


A Promise to Return

by astrangerenters



Category: Arashi (Band), Japanese Actor RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Family, Romance, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 21:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrangerenters/pseuds/astrangerenters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knew that her parents found her odd, had been concerned about her for years now. Perhaps they thought something terrible had happened to her that day in the woods, the day they believed she'd made up everything about what she'd seen. Something had happened, of course, but it wasn't what they thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Matsuo Village in this story is inspired by a [real](http://www.michaeljohngrist.com/2009/08/the-mist-wreathed-apartments-of-matsuo-mine/) [place](http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/matsuo-mine), though I've done my own thing with it.

It was always an entire day's drive to her grandparents' house. They went once or twice a year whenever Shihori had a break from school that coincided with vacation time for her father. They left their average house in average Arakawa, left the hot Tokyo summer for the long drive north.

Her mother had been born there, way up in Iwate, a place Shihori liked to point out on the map of Japan in the classroom. "My mama's from here," she said proudly. "And my grandma and grandpa are still there." Nobody else in Shihori's class had relatives who lived anywhere so remote. The drive took them through mountains, the distance between cities increasing as the family's Toyota moved along the highway. It was green, so lush and so green. Trees and hills and mountains, a Japan her classmates rarely saw the way she got to.

They left Tokyo during the morning rush and they'd usually make it to the last major city, Morioka, by mid-afternoon. Then it was another hour, passing smaller towns and farms, before they made it to Grandma's. Unlike their average house in average Arakawa, Shihori's grandparents lived in a large, old-fashioned home, nestled snugly in a grove of tall cedar trees at the end of a dirt road. It had squeaky wooden corridors that Shihori helped Grandma scrub, a kitchen without appliances, and a pond full of algae that Grandpa stubbornly refused to clean. It was freezing cold in winter, her mother always explained. "That's why we come in summer."

"That's why your mother left," her father always explained out of her mother's earshot. "She'd live in Hawaii if she could."

But the trip north was different this time, a month before Shihori's tenth birthday. They weren't coming in summer. It was late fall, not so very cold in average Arakawa, but Shihori's mom bundled her up in a warm jacket. This time it wasn't so green, but full of burning reds and oranges as the fingers of autumn color crept north across Japan.

This time Shihori wasn't coming to run around with Grandpa and the dog. She wasn't coming north to scrub the floors until Grandma's back hurt and they called it a day. This time her father kept the radio tuned to the news station for most of the trip instead of playing the CD Shihori had chosen from her favorite pop group. This time her mother's face was sad as she gazed out the window toward Mount Iwate when the Toyota pulled off the highway.

Grandpa had been employed in a sulfur mine. It had bent him over, given him a cough, but it had never made him sick until now. Her father held her hand as the family gathered their duffel bags, made their way into the house. It didn't smell right when she crossed the threshold, slipped out of her shoes. Grandma always made food to welcome them, but the house wasn't open and sunny, the dog wasn't barking. There were cobwebs in the corners and shadows in the unlit corridors. It was like Grandpa being sick had made the old house sick too.

Shihori was settled in one of the rooms with her cousin, Maki. Maki's dad and her mother were siblings, but Maki lived way south near Fukuoka, and they rarely saw each other. Besides, Maki was only seven and she still liked little kid shows and playing with dolls. They had nothing in common but their straight, boring black hair and a mutual fondness for Grandpa's dog, Panda, so named for his rough black and white mutt fur.

Grandma didn't leave Grandpa's side, the two of them tucked into their room at the back of the house with their children. For now, her father and Aunt Marina, Maki's mom, kept them busy. As the light in the cousins' shared room buzzed overhead, the adults taught Maki how to play Old Maid and Shihori played along with indifference, wanting to see Grandpa and beg him to get better so they could take Panda out.

Aunt Marina left to make dinner, and Shihori was recruited to help chop vegetables. Her aunt was usually calm and collected, but Grandma's unfamiliar kitchen set-up was making her temperamental. None of Shihori's chopping was good enough, and she was finally dismissed, stuck playing Old Maid with her father and Maki until dinner time.

It was a strange dinner, everyone sitting around the table in Grandma's dining room, the table barely cleared off. There were stacks of unopened mail and magazines. She heard her parents mumbling to one another about Grandma, something that wasn't for Shihori to hear. As the family minus grandparents ate their meal, Shihori could hear Grandpa's cough. Eventually her father turned on the tiny little TV set in the corner of the room, the one that got such bad reception that only TV Asahi came in with any regularity. The coughing went on for what seemed like way too long, and Shihori poked at her meal unhappily. At her side, Maki mostly ignored her dinner, brushing her ugly little doll's hair so hard that dark strands were tearing from its head.

The girls were put to bed early, lying side by side in their futons in the dark. Shihori thought it was unfair that she had to go to bed at a little kid time, especially when she heard her cousin cry a bit in her sleep. 

She woke in the middle of the night needing to pee, and she tossed off her duvet cover, padding to the dark old toilet in the back of the house. She had always hated the little room, the creaky sound of the fan that turned on as soon as she shut the door. When she came out, yanking the chain to shut off the light bulb inside, she nearly gasped.

Grandpa was there, standing in the hall in his pajamas. It was dark but somehow she knew it was him, knew it was his hunched-over shape. "Shii-chan," he whispered. "Don't go into the forest. You'll only regret it in the end."

She wanted to say something, wanted to say anything, but she was still half asleep and half annoyed from having to use the creepy toilet room. She only nodded and headed back to bed. It was only when she got back into her futon that she realized how odd Grandpa's message had been, how odd it was that he'd been in the hallway waiting for her. But sleep came for her before she could give it any more thought.

\--

When she woke again, Grandpa had passed away in his sleep, and her mother's sobs were sounding throughout the house. The town doctor had come before Shihori woke along with Grandma's friend, whose husband owned the funeral home in town. 

Maki was crying in her mother's arms, and Shihori's father was sitting with the TV on low, unsure of what to do. Shihori felt Grandpa's loss like someone had punched her in the stomach, sitting down and leaning against her father as the ache grew and grew. But she didn't cry. She couldn't cry. All she could think about was Grandpa's voice in the hallway, the strange things he'd said.

"Grandpa was up last night. I got up to use the bathroom," she said quietly, feeling her father's strong arm around her even though it did nothing to warm her.

Her father sounded confused. "You were probably having a dream, Shii. Grandpa never left his bed for the last few weeks. I'm very sorry."

She didn't leave her father's embrace, staring at the pictures and colors of the TV without really seeing them. But it _had_ been Grandpa in the hall, Grandpa telling her not to go into the forest. He'd been alive. He'd wanted to tell her something. But now he was dead. She hadn't even bothered to ask him why. She'd simply been an idiot, walking back to bed and ignoring him.

There were arrangements to be made, and the adults busied themselves with everything. Grandma sat in her room, and Maki and Panda kept her company. Shihori was mostly left alone to wonder just what had happened. She had to get out of the house. Telling her mother that she was going to the pond, she laced up her sneakers and went out, not bothering to grab her coat.

She stared at the green mush coating the pond, at a stray duck who was in residence in the scummy water. Her father said it was impossible, but Shihori knew what she'd seen. The house was full of death, full of sad feelings behind her. The trees in front of her were tall and strong, the forest she and Grandpa had walked through so many times with Panda. It had only been months ago, this past summer, when they'd gone to look for mushrooms. The forest had been full of mosquitoes and other creepy bugs, but otherwise it never posed much danger. Why had Grandpa warned her?

There wasn't a path, Grandpa had just always known which way was best. Tears hit her then when she made it to the edge of the trees, not knowing the way to go. Grandpa had said not to go. Maybe he'd just meant not to go without him, to wait until he was better. But now Grandpa was gone. The Grandpa-shaped part of her heart had been ripped out, taken from her. Grandma would be up here in Iwate by herself, swallowed up in the house beyond the cedars.

In her heart, Shihori knew that she should go back in the house, should help in whatever way she could. She was nine now, and she had to be a bit more grown up. More mature. She'd always been obedient, never caused trouble. But a gust of wind swept through the cedars, making the hairs on her arms stand on end. Grandpa was gone, and she wouldn't get to walk here with him again.

She could feel the tracks of her tears drying on her face as she took her first steps in, moving up and over some branches. She felt compelled to move forward, to keep moving. It was different in the autumn. The colors were different, the air was colder. There were dark black birds somewhere, calling to each other. She wanted to call to them too, ask them what they knew.

Without her jacket she was cold in minutes. Her grandparents' house was higher up in the hills, and the trips she'd always taken with Grandpa kept them on steady ground. But as Shihori walked, trying to avoid low-hanging branches and fallen tree trunks, she noticed that the path was angling downward, her sneakers squelching in mud and tromping grass.

She was lost now, too far gone to call for help. Her parents would be furious. Didn't they have enough to worry about? And here was their daughter, lost in the woods. It made her cry more, and she stumbled along, the drops coming at sharper angles now, propelling her down.

Shihori didn't know if she'd been in the woods for an hour or for ten when she came to a clearing, shivering with cold. It was then that she found the village.

\--

The tree-line stopped and the hill dipped down low, revealing a grassy valley and another set of hills just beyond. It seemed an odd place for a town, especially one so sizeable. She couldn't hear any cars, any normal city sounds like they had in average Arakawa or even Morioka. But a city was a city, wasn't it? Concrete buildings rose up like dull gray giants on several of the hills. Apartment buildings, just like those in Arakawa, with balconies and clotheslines.

She wasn't lost, not completely now, she decided, wiping at her eyes. Someone in town would know how to get her back to Grandma's. She knew she was filthy, some of the forest mud having splashed up onto her jeans, and her hair was full of tangles. She shivered as she hurried down the hill and away from the forest.

It was still odd to not see any cars, but maybe the town had banned them. There were parts of Tokyo that were closed off to traffic during the day so people could shop. Maybe it was the same here. Eventually a path appeared on the hill, a cracked bit of pavement that was full of potholes. No wonder nobody was driving.

Her shins hurt as she moved up the hill, sneakers smacking the pavement. She could finally hear signs of life. There were women on the apartment balconies, taking in clothes. The sky was gray, and maybe it would rain. There were kids running around in the apartment courtyards. Beyond the concrete apartments that seemed to ring the entire town, she finally saw a normal enough street.

A small grocery store, a police box, a few other stores. There weren't many customers. Aside from the people she'd seen upon coming into town, it seemed there weren't even enough people to live in all those buildings. She decided that her best bet was to speak to a police officer. It was what she'd learned in school, and even though her parents would punish her for running off so recklessly, they'd feel better knowing she regretted her mistake and went straight to the police for help.

But as soon as she left the sidewalk to cross the crumbled road to the police box, she had the wind knocked out of her, tumbling to the ground and feeling a sudden shock of pain as she skinned her knee even through her denim.

"Hey, look where you're going!" came the squeaky, scratchy sound of a boy's voice. Their eyes met, and Shihori wanted to kick him. He was the one who'd run into her!

The boy was a few years older, probably in junior high. He had messy black hair, long and skinny arms and legs, and dark, squinting eyes. He suddenly looked embarrassed when he realized what he'd done. "Oh, a girl," he mumbled to himself, scrambling to his feet. "Sorry."

"What the hell, you're running into girls now?" came the sound of another boy's voice, skidding to a halt and giving the first boy a shove. Shihori could only sit there, trying not to cry in front of these strangers. The second boy was shorter than his friend, with shorter hair and a mole on his chin. "Wait a minute..."

The boys exchanged a look, and finally Shihori couldn't take it any longer. "That hurt!" she squealed, hands turning to fists.

The second boy ran off to the police box, and the first boy, the idiot boy, held out his hand. "Are you okay? I'm sorry, honest. I was in a hurry..."

She took his hand because she had little other choice, looking down at the state of herself. Covered in mud, jeans torn at the knee, and she knew she'd probably scraped it. She bit her lip. "I want to go home," she said, feeling like a kid. She probably sounded like Maki, like a baby. 

"Nino's going to get Katori-san. He's the policeman, so..."

She stood there, balancing her weight on her good leg. She was in so much trouble. It only took the sight of the first boy's friend, the Nino kid, coming over with a man in a blue police uniform for the tears to escape, and she burst into tears in the middle of this half-empty town in the middle of nowhere.

"Ah, don't cry!" the first boy said, looking horrified. He must have thought she was crying because he'd knocked her down.

"Aiba-kun, Ninomiya-kun, let's get her inside, okay?" came the policeman's voice.

Shihori could only let them lead her across the street and into the small police station, Officer Katori letting her hold on to his arm. He was tall and strong with a smiling face, and she just sensed that she could trust him unlike the two stupid boys who ran around like a bunch of jerks.

But they still hovered as Officer Katori settled her in a hard wooden chair next to his desk. It was a messy office, with stacks of manila folders everywhere. Ninomiya-kun, the short boy who apparently went by Nino, moved to a sink in the rear of the office and put some water in a cup for her. The current bane of her existence, this Aiba-kun, stood there and fidgeted, staring at her rudely.

She sipped the water and let Officer Katori roll up her pant leg, and he diligently cleaned up her knee and put on a bandage for her. When she was all set there, his smiling face grew a bit more grave. He dismissed the two boys from the office, although Shihori could still hear them whispering to each other outside.

"Can you tell me your name?" Officer Katori asked, still kneeling before her.

"Kanjiya Shihori, from Arakawa, Tokyo. I'm nine years old but I'll be ten soon and my mother is Natsuko and my father is Atsushi and..."

Officer Katori chuckled. "Slow down, Shihori-chan, it's okay. You're not in trouble with me. I just want to help you." He pulled out a pen from the pocket of his uniform jacket and took a pad of paper from the desk. "You're from Tokyo? How'd you get up here?"

He was being so nice and trying to help and she could still hear those boys outside being noisy. The craziness of her entire day, with the loss of Grandpa and running away and her parents being worried...it all came to a head and she started crying again. Officer Katori panicked, finding a handkerchief for her and staying by her side as she told him everything. Why she was in Iwate, getting lost in the forest, finding the village, getting knocked down by that stupid Aiba-kun. She cried and cried, like she'd wanted to for Grandpa that morning.

"Well, it's very fortunate that you came here today," Officer Katori said. "Out of all the days in the year, I'm so glad you came today."

She wasn't sure what he was saying or why, but it felt comforting in a sense. She simply nodded, blowing her nose.

"I'm very sorry about your grandfather. You say he lived in Hachimantai?" Officer Katori said, scratching his head. 

"At the end of a dirt road. I...I don't know the name of the road, but they don't live right in town. It's a big house with a pond. That's where my parents are. I'm a Kanjiya and so is my dad, but my mom is a Horikita, if that helps? My grandpa was Horikita Taiyo."

That made Officer Katori's eyes widen. Did he know her family? She didn't have a chance to ask because he was getting to his feet. "Aiba-kun!" Officer Katori shouted. "I know you're still out there!"

The boy poked his head around the doorframe, frowning. "Yes sir?"

"As a way of apologizing to Kanjiya-san for being such a clumsy oaf, you'll be escorting her home."

"What? Why me?" Aiba protested, but Katori's face remained stern.

"Kanjiya-san's grandfather passed away this morning, Horikita Taiyo-san. You know where that house is?"

Aiba-kun paled, and Shihori was all the more confused. Did everyone in this strange little town know her grandfather? How come he had never mentioned this place, not even once during all their walks in the woods?

"Yes, Officer Katori. I know where it is."

Katori glanced up at the clock, and Shihori nearly went into a panic. It was already 5:00 PM and the sun was setting. "Aiba-kun, please mind the curfew."

"Come on," Aiba said abruptly, grabbing her hand and taking a flashlight off of Katori's desk. "Come on, I'll take you home."

"Gentler," Katori chastised him, standing in the doorway as Aiba roughly pulled her out of the police box. "You know how to get back. Be nice to her."

Ninomiya-kun only stared at her as Aiba walked her back through the center of town. With the darkness had come fog, most of the streets already shrouded in the mist. The streets looked even emptier than they had when she arrived. But this Aiba knew exactly where he was going, pulling her along even as she limped and complained.

Aiba-kun's hand was sweaty and gross, and she pulled away from him, following at her own pace. "I fell because of you, you know," she said as they wandered back the way she'd come in search of help. She wished that Officer Katori was the one taking her back. How come he didn't have a police car? Or even a bike to bring her home?

"Yeah well I said I was sorry," Aiba muttered. He kept looking around, growing more nervous the closer they came to the edge of town.

Soon she'd be home, hopefully, if this Aiba-kun had any sense of direction. Then she'd never have to see his stupid face again. "What's the name of this town anyway?" she asked. 

"Matsuo Village," he said. "Hurry up, it's dark and the woods aren't safe."

"And you can just run back home in the dark? Can you see in the dark or something?"

He wiggled the flashlight as a reminder. "Ugh, you're the one who's lost, not me, Shihori-chan."

"Don't call me that," she protested, knee still aching as they moved into the valley and back in the direction of the cedar trees. "We're not friends and I don't know you."

"You're just lucky your Grandpa..."

Shihori stopped, nearly stumbling over a branch at the entrance to the forest. "How did you know him?"

Aiba looked embarrassed, as though he'd said something he shouldn't. "Look, seriously. I have to take you home. You can't stay in Matsuo Village."

She walked after him, following the beam of the flashlight as he turned it on and navigated them through the forest. "I wouldn't stay there anyway."

"Well good."

"Good."

Ugh, he was the most annoying person she'd ever met. She thought of Officer Katori's gentle smile, even that Ninomiya boy would be a better companion than Aiba-kun. The two of them stayed quiet, Aiba slowing his pace a bit so she could keep up and not lose him. But he was the type of boy who wouldn't shut up for long. Shihori had a few boys like that in her class at school, always getting in trouble for talking out of turn.

"How old are you?" he asked her.

"Nine."

"I'm twelve," he said proudly, as though he was better than her just for being older. "I play baseball, what do you like to do?"

"Read manga."

He nodded. "I haven't read any in a while. We don't have anything new to read..."

"So why not buy some more?"

Aiba's foot snapped a twig in two noisily. "You wouldn't believe me."

"Are you a liar? Is that why?"

He laughed, this high-pitched kind of snort that annoyed her immediately. "I don't lie. My mom raised me better than that. It's just that it's not easy for Matsuo Village to get anything new."

"Probably because you don't have any cars," Shihori reasoned.

Aiba laughed. "Yeah, that's definitely part of it."

They quieted down again. Shihori had no idea where they were going, but Aiba-kun didn't hesitate once, navigating them through the forest easily. It was getting harder to walk after the long day, and she knew she was going to be sick. She still had no jacket. Aiba's jacket looked a little small on him, like he'd been wearing it a few years too many.

"Are we getting close?"

"Maybe another half an hour. You sure walked far on your own," Aiba admitted. He kicked at some leaves. "Look, I am sorry about your Grandpa. Really. He was a good friend to our village."

Then how come she'd never heard about Matsuo Village before? Shihori could only think of Grandpa's warning the night before. Not to go into the forest. She'd gone ahead and done just the opposite, finding the strangely empty city arrayed on those hills. There'd been more buildings than people to fill them. It was an odd place, Aiba's hometown.

"Thank you," she said in reply, feeling her eyes fill with tears again. She only saw her Grandpa a few times a year, had spoken with him on the phone. There was so much about his life up here that was a mystery. It was odd to think of Grandpa walking all the way to Matsuo Village with his bad back, Panda at his side. "He was a nice man."

"The nicest," Aiba said quietly. "He brought us things. He was a good help. My mom always said so."

And now he was gone. She couldn't stop crying, sniffling from her tears and from the cold. Aiba walked even slower, the beam of his flashlight quivering a bit as they kept walking. Maybe he was crying too.

"Maybe you should come for the funeral. It'll be in a few days, I think," she said. "If you or your friends knew my Grandpa."

"Ah, that's impossible." Aiba sounded truly sad. "That's impossible for us, I'm sorry."

"Why? I don't think my Grandma would mind. Since you helped me..."

Aiba stopped walking, leaning back against a tree. She couldn't see his face since he kept the flashlight pointed at the ground. "Shihori-chan, Matsuo Village isn't like wherever you come from. It's impossible, okay? I'm really sorry."

She didn't bother to correct him for being overly familiar this time. "But you'd only have to walk, the same as we're walking now!"

Aiba sighed. "I'm sure your parents are worried. Let me just bring you home."

The boy offered no other explanation. He was totally weird, and she scowled the rest of the way back. They climbed back up the hill, and Aiba had to hold her hand and pull her along. They finally reached the clearing, and Shihori could see flashing lights. Police cars.

"I bet you're in a ton of trouble," Aiba said, staying back as she moved to approach the edge of the woods.

"Well, why don't you come and tell them what happened? You're a witness, like on TV!"

He stayed where he was. "I've brought you home, just like Officer Katori told me to. But I have to get back."

She stomped her feet, and a shot of pain from her knee coursed through her. "You're a real jerk, okay!"

"And you're kind of a brat," he shot back, though he said it with that annoying laughing voice of his.

"I'm going!" she said.

"Then go!"

"I will!"

"Fine!"

"Fine!" she snapped at him. She turned up her nose at him, turning around and heading for the clearing. When she looked over her shoulder, Aiba-kun was already gone.

\--

There was a flurry of activity upon her return. The Hachimantai police had been searching the woods for her all day, and her mother collapsed on the ground as soon as she saw her, sitting in an ambulance with a blanket wrapped around her. 

It had been a terrible day for her family, and she'd ruined everything by running away. But when she tried to explain where she'd gone, that she'd found Matsuo Village, that Officer Katori had helped her and that the boy, Aiba-kun, had escorted her back, everyone stared at her a little oddly. Her mother merely kept an arm around her, stroking her hair while her father looked on, smoking a cigarette. The police jotted down what she told them, but they looked at her like she'd said something wrong.

She was ushered into the house, and Aunt Marina had made stew that Shihori devoured quickly. Now that the police were gone, she got the scolding of a lifetime from her father. Grounded indefinitely, and no new CDs. And she couldn't go to the handshake event for her favorite singing group, even though she and a school friend had bought the tickets already. They scolded her for worrying Grandma on the worst possible day, for being selfish and running away, and then for turning up and lying about it.

But she hadn't lied. She hadn't lied about seeing Grandpa the night before, but her father hadn't believed her. She'd told everything she'd seen that day, every single thing down to the mole on Ninomiya-kun's chin. Her parents exchanged worried looks. They sent her to bed, and Maki kept her up asking stupid questions about where she'd gone and if she'd tried to go back to Tokyo on an airplane. Dumb kid questions like always.

When she woke in the morning, she finally saw Grandma, who was sitting in her empty room, the room that still smelled like Grandpa. She was staring out the window, stroking Panda's head, the dog leaning against her looking just as sad as Shihori felt.

She sat at her Grandma's side, trying not to cry. She'd done enough of that. She bowed her head low, apologizing for being such a terrible grandchild.

"They told me about your stories," Grandma said, not meeting her eyes.

"They aren't stories. They're true."

"Matsuo," Grandma said quietly. She had none of her usual humor, none of her endless smiles. "Taiyo told me stories about Matsuo."

She scooted closer. Did Grandma believe her? Nobody believed her, but maybe Grandma did! "I was there, Grandma. It's a whole city with buildings and a police station and..."

Finally Grandma looked over at her. "You have your grandfather's imagination, Shii-chan." She smiled, eyes watering. "But your mama never believed his stories. Maybe it's best you forgot, hmm?"

She looked down. Grandma didn't believe her after all. She wanted to tell Grandma about seeing Grandpa in the hallway, about his last words to her. But if Grandma didn't believe her, who would?

The next days passed in a flash with the funeral and the other friends and family who found their way to the big house in the forest clearing. Shihori's incident was kept quiet, and her parents forbid her to speak of it. She stood out on the porch of the house, standing in the chill, looking to the woods. For Aiba-kun, for Officer Katori.

They never came, and Shihori got back in the car when it was over. She returned to average Arakawa and her average house, and her afternoon in Matsuo Village faded like the fog that swallowed the town whole.

\--

Her mother traveled north often to look in on Grandma, who refused to leave the house in the woods and move south closer to the family. Shihori was conveniently left home every time, as though she was liable to run away again and make up stories.

Her memories grew hazy as she got lost in schoolwork, in fun times with her friends. A year passed and Grandpa's death anniversary arrived. Her mother went north for that and Shihori's uncle too, but Shihori stayed home with her father to make sure he didn't burn the kitchen down. All she got to do was speak with Grandma on the phone, tell her about school and the manga she was reading. Shihori prayed at the small altar in their house instead, the small photo of Grandpa they kept there.

In that fashion another year passed. Then another. It was Grandpa's third death anniversary when the family reunited again at the old house. Shihori's uncle and aunt arrived the same day, Maki in tow. Shihori was twelve and her cousin ten, and she was happy to discover that Maki had grown up a bit. She was still a bit shy where Shihori had grown up a bit bossy, but Maki finally left the dolls at home. They spent the first afternoon sitting out by the pond, filthy as ever, with Panda. 

They talked about boys a bit, though Maki was pretty convinced most of them were gross. Shihori, however, had started to change her mind recently. Next year she'd be in junior high school. Maybe she'd find her first boyfriend.

The next day was the anniversary, and Shihori remembered how terribly she'd worried the family. For the first time in a long time, she found herself thinking about Matsuo Village, about the odd experience she'd had there. There'd been a policeman. He'd bandaged her knee...she'd never shown her parents. That would have been all the proof she needed, the proof that Matsuo Village was real.

She frowned, pulling on her jacket and stepping outside. She crossed her arms, staring out at the woods, the blood red leaves rustling in the wind. It was an unspoken rule that Shihori was forbidden to enter the woods there again. But soon Maki was outside too, standing at her side like a shadow.

"My mom said you made it all up. Because you were sad about Grandpa," Maki said. "Don't tell her I told you, she'd be embarrassed."

Shihori scowled, crossing her arms tighter. Her cousin could be stupidly straightforward sometimes. "Well I didn't make it up, okay? They knew Grandpa."

Maki pursed her lips. "Prove it."

Shihori turned, seeing mischief in her cousin's eyes for the very first time. She knew Uncle Taku and Aunt Marina were stricter than her own parents. Maki's total weirdness certainly came from that, she thought. But there was no way the two of them could go into the woods, not a chance. She told Maki as much.

"But we can take the bikes from the storage shed and go to town. Your dad said that was okay during breakfast this morning. Then we just come back and go find your made-up village instead."

Shihori smiled at her cousin. There was an interesting girl in there somewhere, hidden under the blunt black fringe and behind that button nose. Sometimes Shihori went to a manga cafe with her friends after school, telling her mom that she'd actually been at the library. This wouldn't be so different. And besides, she wouldn't be alone this time. She'd be with Maki.

She held out her pinky. "I, Kanjiya Shihori, do solemnly swear that Matsuo Village is real. And when I prove to you that it is, you will buy me a manga volume of my choice, even if it takes your whole allowance."

Maki grinned, seeming thrilled to be involved in something naughty for once. The cousins really were better behaved than most, Shihori thought. She shook Shihori's pinky with her own. "And I, Horikita Maki, think you're a grade A fibber, and when there's no town at all you have to treat me to karaoke. Even if it takes your whole allowance."

Shihori nodded. They had an alliance.

\--

While Maki charmed their parents into letting the girls head into town, Shihori knelt in front of the altar in the living room. Grandpa's smiling face looked back at her, three years gone. "Matsuo Village is real," she whispered to the portrait. "I'm taking Maki-chan, and even if nobody else believes, we will. I wish you could come with us."

Maki found her, shaking the keys to the storage shed. "We have to be back before sundown, or your dad's driving into town shouting our names from the car. That would be so embarrassing."

It really would be, imagining her calm, mild-mannered father hollering in the street for her. Well, it would be quicker this time. She was older, and she probably had a better sense of direction. Just follow the hill down.

The girls pulled the bikes out of the shed, adjusting the seats. They were old bicycles with rather uncomfortable seats, and they'd belonged to their parents. Shihori's mother was taller, even when she was younger, and Shihori had to shift the seat down to accommodate her shortness. Maki rang the tiny little bell on the bike. "Karaoke, Shii-chan. I'm gonna win."

"I'm gonna smack your face," she threatened in return, though she'd never actually do it. She just wanted to see the look in Maki's eyes when she first saw the concrete buildings appear out of the fog. But she had to get them there first.

With Maki's father standing guard on the porch, they obediently pedaled down the dirt road, disappearing around the corner as though they were truly planning to head into town. They went half a mile down before Maki turned off the path, biking over the bumpy grass toward the cedar trees that lined the road back toward the house.

"Which way? Which way, Shii-chan?"

They rode along the tree-line, dodging rocks as best they could before ditching the bikes at the edge of the forest. It was mid-morning, so they had plenty of time. They'd get back to the bikes, hurry to town and buy something, and then go back to the house with their parents none the wiser.

The distance seemed shorter this time. It was like Shihori was being drawn forward, as if her body knew the right way to go even though it had been three years, pulling her down along with the slope of the land. She supposed that since she wasn't so upset it was easier to make her way there this time. She'd been in a daze the first time. 

Maki complained a bit as some mud spattered against her red pants, but Shihori kept walking. Victory was surely in her grasp. It was maybe a good twenty or thirty minutes before they reached the point where the woods gave way, and she heard Maki's gasp when they emerged.

It was even foggier than it had been three years ago but there was no mistaking the buildings perched on the hill, the gray winding snake of a road peeking out from the center of town. They stood together watching, and Maki was so stunned that she wrapped her arm around a tree, clinging to it in shock.

Shihori settled her hands on her hips. "See, I'm not a liar. It's a whole town, you know."

"I'm sorry, Shii-chan, for not believing."

"And it'll only cost you the price of the newest One Piece. I'll be nice and ask for something easy."

Maki only nodded, squinting out across the valley. "Kind of a scary place, don't you think? And you went all the way into town?"

"Dare you to come with me."

Her cousin hesitated. "Maybe we should go back. I believe you, isn't that enough?"

But Shihori shook her head. It had been three years, and nothing had changed. They hadn't even fixed the street. And Shihori had a nagging desire to visit no matter what. She'd never gotten to properly thank Officer Katori for his help. The man had helped her that day, and all she'd done was get snot all over his handkerchief like a big baby.

"The people there are nice," she said, trying to sound encouraging. So long as they didn't run into that stupid boy, Aiba-kun.

But then Maki gasped, rustling some leaves as she suddenly jolted. Shihori watched her cousin point, out across the valley. They'd been so caught up in the sight of the fog shrouding the hills that they hadn't even thought to look down.

There in the valley, just where the old road stopped, was a makeshift baseball diamond. Shihori could only tell that's what it was because of the placement of people. There was someone up to bat, and as she squinted, she could see other people placed where the bases, pitcher's mound, and outfield were supposed to be. She was struck with the memory of Aiba-kun, much as she could happily go the rest of her life without seeing him. He'd mentioned that he'd liked baseball that day.

She turned to give her cousin a shake. "Let's go check it out. We can cheer them on."

"But we don't even know them," Maki said, frowning. "I believe you, I said I did. But they're strangers, and I'm not brave like you."

Shihori was undeterred. Maybe Officer Katori was down there, or at the very least the people could tell her where he was. It was foolish to come all this way and not see what was going on in Matsuo Village. She set off, hearing Maki grumble in protest. She could follow or not.

As they drew closer, she could see that the assembled baseball team was made up of people of all ages. Some people her parents' age, others teenagers a few years older than her. When she drew close, enough to see the pitcher tilt up his cap and stare at her, she realized that there were familiar faces in the crowd.

The game ground to a screeching halt, and the pitcher dropped his glove and the ball, running from the mound in her direction. Well, maybe this had been a bad idea, Shihori thought, glancing back to see that Maki had followed her, but slowly, and was several feet back looking shy.

The other players huddled together, the two middle-aged men and teenage girl in the outfield running over to join the infielders. The catcher got out of his crouch, lifting his mask and jogging up behind the pitcher.

"I don't believe it!" the pitcher said, and as soon as she saw him up close, she kind of wanted to turn back. It was Aiba-kun, older and taller than before and just as lanky. His baseball uniform was nothing more than a ratty pair of jeans and a very old looking Hanshin Tigers t-shirt. It was chilly for November, but he was sweating like crazy. The first thought Shihori had was that he'd kind of gotten cuter, but then she shoved that thought away, reminding herself of how he'd not come for her Grandpa's funeral and had made such lame excuses.

The catcher was about Aiba-kun's age, but Shihori didn't recognize him from her previous visit. He was of a height with Aiba, with thick, unruly eyebrows and a crooked smile. "Who's this?" he asked. "Masaki, you know her?"

Apparently Masaki was Aiba's first name. "She's the girl," Aiba said. "The girl from three years ago. And here she is again, on the exact same day."

She could hear her cousin approaching, could sense Maki trying to sneak up close but still hide behind her. Shihori crossed her arms. "I'm not 'the girl,' you know, I have a name."

Aiba nodded, leaning back and grinning. He was still kind of a jerk, even if he'd gotten cute. "Oh of course. Where are my manners? Jun-kun, this is Shihori-sama, Matsuo Village's girl of legend." Aiba leaned close, smirking. "You didn't get much taller in three years."

She felt herself go red at his teasing. "Look, this is my cousin Maki. She didn't believe me that Matsuo Village is real. So I wanted to prove it to her."

"Send them home," came a third voice. The boy who'd been up to bat walked over. It took a bit of rude staring until she saw the telltale mole on his chin. Ninomiya-kun. Nino, her memory corrected. 

A chilly wind swept down from the village, howling through the breaks between the buildings. It came rushing down into the valley, making Shihori's hair fly wildly. She felt Maki's arm slide through hers, holding on. "I wanted to see Officer Katori," she explained, tugging some strands of hair out of her mouth. "That's all, I just wanted to say thank you for last time. I'm sorry it took so long for me to come back."

The three boys exchanged a look. It seemed to be a Matsuo Village trait. One of the women who'd been playing, the shortstop who seemed close in age to Shihori's mother, walked over. Unlike the three annoying teenagers, she had an air of authority to her. "Who are these young ladies?" the woman asked pointedly, looking at Shihori like she had two heads.

Aiba took over the introductions while the catcher boy, Jun, looked off towards the woods they'd come from. Nino, however, looked just as serious as the woman. "This is Shihori," Aiba explained. "And her cousin. She's the girl who was here three years ago. Officer Katori talked to her."

The woman's eyes widened in understanding. Of what, Shihori didn't know. But was she really that infamous around town here? The girl who was here three years ago - as though nobody else had been around since. What was with this place?

"Taiyo-san's granddaughters then," the woman said with a nod. "Taiyo-san's family will always be welcome in Matsuo Village, I can't deny them hospitality."

"We don't want to be a bother," Maki interrupted, her voice quiet and shy. She gave a tug on Shihori's arm, as though to pull her back to the woods. "We're sorry for ruining your game."

"We're just not used to outsiders," Jun said, though Nino elbowed him for saying so. Jun scowled at him. "What, it's the truth!"

The woman hushed the boys with a mere look. She turned to Shihori. "Taiyo-san never spoke to you of this place, did he?"

She shook her head.

"I see," the woman said. "Please join us for lunch since you've come all this way."


	2. Chapter 2

Shihori and Maki were encouraged to sit in the grass and watch another inning of the baseball game. Nobody else from the village had come down, and the odd mix of players on each team had her rather confused. It was a strange assortment of people in Matsuo Village. 

Maki's initial worry had subsided, if only because she'd taken an interest in one of the boys, Nino. He was the quietest of the three. While he waited on deck to bat, he kept turning back to look at the two of them. He didn't have Aiba's teasing attitude, Jun's cheerful indifference. He looked at them like he knew them, or like he knew something about them. Shihori remembered how Nino had stared at her when Aiba had taken her out of the village last time. A look in his eyes she'd not been able to forget.

When the game wrapped up, the older woman put an arm around Aiba's shoulders, yanking off his cap and ruffling his hair playfully. The three boys and the girl from the outfield, Mirei, were apparently coming for lunch as well.

As they walked up the broken street toward the looming apartment blocks, the woman introduced herself as Eiko, the Village Elder and coincidentally as Eiko, Aiba's mother. Maki held Shihori's hand tightly as they walked, still untrusting. They passed by Officer Katori's police box, and Shihori waved to him. He looked up from his still ridiculous stack of manila folders, his face going white as a sheet at the sight of her. But Eiko-san kept walking and so did the four teenagers, so Shihori didn't have much time for a reunion. 

The streets of Matsuo Village were as empty as they'd been the previous time. There were no cars anywhere, and weeds grew up through some of the cracks in the cement. Eiko-san led them to an apartment block with a large "Block 8" painted on it. As they passed through the entrance hall, there were mailboxes for the residents. Only four had family name plates on them, even though there were nearly a hundred boxes.

"Matsuo Village doesn't have a lot of citizens, does it?" Shihori asked, following the group up the stairs to the second floor.

Nino looked back at her, obviously wanting to say something but holding himself back. Eiko-san only smiled, pulling a key ring from her pocket. "No," she said, her voice echoing off the walls, "we don't have very many now."

The hallway was fairly wide, with gaps where Shihori thought windows ought to be. The wind whipped through them, chilling Shihori to the bone. It had to be cold walking in these halls during the dead of winter, she thought. They were so open and exposed to the elements.

Eiko-san let them inside, and the boys barreled through, shedding their worn-out sneakers and collapsing on the floor of one of the other rooms, slamming the door behind them. Shihori didn't want to say anything, but it seemed like the Aiba family was rather poor. The entire room only had a worn old table and tatami mats that were covered in small stains. There was no TV, no stereo, no computer, not even curtains for the windows. There was another table in the corner with a small oil lamp on it. It had to be dark in here at night. 

There were doors leading to other rooms, probably a bathroom and bedrooms. Shihori sat at the table, Maki sticking like glue to her side. The other girl, Mirei, was rather cute, and Shihori could hear her chirping voice chatting along with the older woman as they took plates out of cabinets and made the usual kitchen time noises. 

It was rude of her to judge Aiba's home, especially when his mother had so kindly invited them inside. But how did they live this way? The whole village was in a state of decay. The roads, the weeds, the buildings. And Eiko-san and Aiba-kun both had known of her Grandpa, had said that he had helped them. What had he done for Matsuo Village and why had he never told anyone? Well, she remembered, he'd told Grandma but she'd never believed him. These people were here though, Mirei and Eiko-san in the kitchen, the three boys noisy in one of the bedrooms with the door closed.

Finally good smells came from the kitchen, although when Eiko-san emerged with a tray and Mirei followed, it was only rice and miso soup. And not the kind of miso Shihori's mother made, but the instant kind that had kind of a grainy texture until you swished it around. Maki didn't say a word, and Shihori thanked Eiko-san for the both of them. The boys came out of the bedroom, crowding around the table. Their faces were filthy and their clothes too, but they gobbled down the food like it was the best thing they'd ever eaten. Shihori felt ashamed, could feel her cheeks burning red for thinking so negatively about their lives here. So what if they were poor? They seemed rather happy.

When the meal was finished, Eiko-san ordered the boys to clean up, and they made all sorts of complaining noises before the three of them went into the kitchen. Mirei got up from the table, waving goodbye and saying "see you again sometime" with a kind of wistful sound in her voice. It must have been lonely to be Mirei-san, Shihori thought. She hadn't seen any other girls her age around Matsuo Village, not during the baseball game or with anyone in the streets. 

That left the two cousins with Eiko-san, who had taken the least amount of food and had eaten very slowly. "It's remarkable that you've come to us not once but twice, Shihori-chan," Eiko-san mused, staring at her with a kind of pointed gaze. "But I suppose that was to be expected from someone who knew Horikita Taiyo."

"How did you know our Grandpa?" Shihori asked. "He never spoke about this village."

Eiko-san looked sad. "He brought us supplies. Bags of food, wonderful things we could store and use for months and not yet finish. He usually pushed it in a wheelbarrow, all the way from his home. He brought us newspapers and magazines." The older woman smiled. "He had better taste when I was younger, and when he got older he picked out some strange things to read. Stories about pirates or the movie stars he'd liked as a young man. Of course, we took everything gratefully."

They really were poor here, Shihori thought, if so much of their survival had counted on an elderly man wheeling things to town. She remembered her first meeting with Aiba, how he'd mentioned not having any new manga to read. "What does everyone do here? What are your jobs?"

Eiko-san frowned. "We do what we can with what we've been given. Though with Taiyo-san gone..."

"Why don't people believe you exist? Nobody believed Shihori when she came back from this village before," Maki piped up, speaking for the first time since they'd arrived in Block 8. Blunt as ever. Shihori made to apologize to Eiko-san for her cousin's rudeness, but that was when the boys returned from the kitchen.

"It's because we don't," Nino said. "Because we don't exist."

"You're hiding?" Maki asked, cocking her head curiously and staring straight at Nino. "On the run?"

Jun laughed, scratching at his hair. "That would be much more interesting."

Eiko-san drummed her fingers on the table. "It's a delicate situation..."

"It's not delicate, Mom," Aiba protested. "It's how things are and how they'll be forever. You may as well just tell her. And then she'll go home again and it won't matter because nobody would believe her anyway."

Shihori was suddenly hurt by Aiba's words. She could see that Aiba and Nino were in agreement; they both doubted her. But what was wrong with this place? Why did it rely on the kindness of people like her Grandpa? Why did everyone look at her and Maki so strangely? Why did Nino say that they didn't exist? They were standing right in front of her. She'd eaten their food, spoken with them.

"This town is cursed," Eiko-san said quietly, and a shiver ran up Shihori's spine. "It's why we're so empty. It's why we rely on people to help us. It's why nobody believes you. Matsuo Village is not real..."

Shihori's mouth dropped open, looking from Eiko-san to her son to her son's two friends. To the sparsely decorated apartment, to the other buildings rising up just out the window. "But you're real! We're here right now!"

"We're here today," Eiko-san said. "And tomorrow we won't be."

"I don't understand," Shihori answered, more confused than she'd ever been. Her Grandpa's warning about the forest rang in her ears. Officer Katori's words three years earlier, how happy he'd been that she'd come to the village on that specific day, the day her grandfather died. Today was exactly three years from then, the exact same day.

"Today is the only day," Nino said. "Just today. And not tomorrow or the day after that."

"Or the day after that either," Jun added.

Maki clung to her. "Shii-chan, I want to go home."

Shihori elbowed her cousin. "Don't be rude..."

"It's not rude," Eiko-san said, shaking her head before waving at her son sadly. "Ma-kun, you really should take the girls home..."

Shihori found herself thumping her hand on the table. "But I don't understand. You're here!"

"Come back tomorrow, and see for yourself," Nino challenged them, sounding almost mean. "See how real we are."

She was almost as scared as Maki was now. What were these people talking about? Curses and not being real. They'd been so welcoming, but Shihori and Maki's curiosity and questions had riled them up, made them upset. Nobody knew they were here with these people, who were still technically strangers. Their parents didn't even believe in Matsuo Village. Shihori doubted any of these people would do her harm, but they were being so weird. A village couldn't just be there one day and not another, that was absurd.

Shihori didn't get a chance to challenge anything else Eiko-san said. Nino, Aiba, and Jun were lacing up their worn-out sneakers, hinting that it was time to go. They left Block 8 in a hush broken only by the wind blowing down from the mountains and over the hills.

Maki walked on ahead. Matsuo Village seemed extraordinary to her, and Nino and Jun stood on either side of her, answering the million questions she was asking them. Shihori couldn't hear the answers. She was too busy staring around at the buildings, feeling the road under her shoes. It was a road the same as any other, at least in terms of what made it a road. The buildings were buildings, the scattered people were people.

But as she looked closer, she noticed an even more obvious emptiness. The little grocery store didn't have bins full of fresh produce like the ones back home. She peeked inside, saw half empty shelves loaded up with gigantic bags of rice and other items stored in tin cans. There was a spout in the middle of one of the apartment courtyards, and two small boys were pumping water out into a wooden bucket.

Her cousin had gotten far ahead when Aiba came up beside her, giving her a bit of a nudge. "Come on, I've got other stuff to get done today."

"Was it true what Nino said?" she asked. "That you'll be gone tomorrow?"

Aiba nodded. "It's the curse on the village. It's hard to explain because it's, you know, pretty impossible. But we vanish. We pop up one day a year, this day in November."

It sounded silly, but she didn't say so. "But how did the curse happen?"

"It was when my mom was younger, but she and the other adults don't like to talk about it." He kicked a pebble and it skittered down the road. "So I honestly don't know why. Somebody pissed somebody off..." He looked over, blushing a bit about his rude language. "Sorry."

"But you can leave. You can walk me home right?"

"I can go wherever I want today," he explained. "Just today. It's how we survive. People like your grandpa helped, but some of us use this day to go into town and trade for things we need. Help out at a farm or something to earn money to use in the stores. Or some people use this day to leave the village."

Shihori was confused. "But what about the curse?"

"If you're in Matsuo Village at midnight, you go away just like we do. Of course we don't actually go away," Aiba said with a roll of his eyes. "But yeah, that's why there aren't many people left. Too many people hate it, so they leave. Move away and start a new life elsewhere."

They were quiet for a while, seeing Nino and Jun laugh ahead of them as Maki's head pivoted back and forth, firing off questions. Her cousin seemed far less frightened now that they'd left the small apartment in Block 8 and its sad walls desperately in need of paint. Despite her initial quiet, Maki had always been a curious girl.

A strange village - here one day and gone the rest. What kind of curse could do that? It seemed even Aiba didn't know, but yet he stayed. He and his friends, his mother. People like Officer Katori and the people in the outfield. Mirei-san. But even if it vanished, Matsuo Village still had to be there somehow, if only because time carried on. Aiba had grown older these three years.

"Don't you want to leave?" she asked him slowly. "If the whole town moves away, then there's no curse."

He shrugged. "My mom's the Village Elder, and her dad was before her. She won't leave, no matter how hard it is to live here. Matsuo Village is her home, curse or no curse."

She couldn't imagine such a life, only being able to go anywhere on one day a year. She understood now why her Grandpa had befriended Matsuo Village and why he'd helped them. As they made their way out of town and down into the valley, Shihori felt guilty. "This is your one chance to leave, this day," she said. "One day to be normal, and this is the second time you've had to use up your time to walk me around instead. I'm sorry, Aiba-kun."

"It's alright," he said. "When you see the same people every day for the rest of the year, it's kind of nice to see a stranger."

She had an idea, although it was definitely not an idea her parents would like if they found out. Then again, nothing about what she and Maki had done that day was something their parents would like. 

"You have until midnight, right? Well Maki and I have until sunset before we have to get back. Why don't you come into town with us?"

\--

Aiba floated the idea past the other two boys. Jun almost said yes, but he ended up shaking his head halfway through their walk in the woods. He'd promised his father he'd haul in some wood, help stock up for winter. But Aiba and Nino were seemingly pleased with the idea of a day of fun.

They found the bikes, and the boys both insisted on riding. Nino helped Maki to sit on the handlebars, and they sped off, their laughter bouncing off the trees. Shihori had never seen her cousin so happy, especially with how shy she'd been. Maybe learning the secret of Matsuo Village, the still unconfirmed secret, had unlocked something in her brain, made her excited and eager. And maybe she also thought Nino was cute - it had only taken a boy in a secret town to change her mind about boys being gross. It probably helped that Nino was older, someone to look up to, unlike the boys in her class.

Aiba sighed, twisting the seat of the bike up until it was aligned with his height. He patted the handlebars. "Wanna ride up here?"

She crossed her arms. "It's my bike, you should walk."

"All the way to town?" he complained. "No fair."

"Well," she said, seeing Nino steering crookedly, Maki holding on for dear life as they moved around the curve in the road. "You pedal, and I'll sit on the seat. Handlebars are dangerous."

He laughed at her. "Whatever you say, Shihori-sama." He patted the seat. 

She settled herself on the bike seat as Aiba stepped up and onto the pedals. It wobbled a bit, and she put her hands at his waist reflexively to hold on. Gradually he got them moving, pumping his long legs as they hurried after Nino and Maki. Aiba's waist was kind of skinny, but he was warm and very, very real.

Hachimantai wasn't a large city by any means but it was large enough. There were stores and street lights and restaurants. Today she was able to see the town through Aiba and Nino's eyes. Usually Shihori had only come into town to buy sweets or accompany her mother to the grocery store to help restock Grandma's kitchen. But today Aiba and Nino wanted to just take the time and look around.

It was hard for them without any money, but the two older boys walked slowly from store window to store window, looking at sneakers and clothes. Shihori only had her allowance in the small change purse she kept in her pocket, imagining that Maki didn't have much more. But neither of the boys asked her to buy them anything. They just pointed, their eyes going wide, their smiles bittersweet. 

It was the only time they got to experience the world beyond Matsuo Village, and Shihori couldn't even begin to imagine what it was like to come out, see technology and cars and grocery stores full of food. It was like they were taking everything in, memorizing it to last them another year. 

They ended up in a small cafe, and even though the boys protested, she bought them each an ice cream sundae with extra whipped cream. She met Maki's eyes across the table, and her cousin seemed to be feeling the same. Their Grandpa would have been happy to see them, even if they weren't supposed to be alone with boys. He would have been happy they'd become friends, if only for a day.

Because of the lateness of the year, the sun started to set by 5:00 and after browsing through a shop full of manga and a magic shop that Nino took an interest in, it was time for the girls to get back to their grandparents' house. The boys were planning to stay in town just to watch one of the TVs in the window of the electronics store since it was the only TV they'd get to watch all year.

While Maki headed for their bikes and Nino wandered off toward the electronics store, Aiba looked at her shyly. "Thanks again for the ice cream. That was definitely something your Grandpa could never bring us."

"Well, you helped me too," she admitted. "And I was kind of mean to you last time."

"Yeah, you were."

She gave him a punch in the arm. "You're still a jerk!"

He laughed, and she wondered if she'd ever hear the sound of it again. She was suddenly full of an odd sadness, knowing that it was unlikely she'd come north again any time soon. It was hard for her father to get away, and she couldn't really make up excuses to visit Grandma during school term. When would she even see Aiba again? Or Nino? The others she'd met that day?

"Don't be sad," he teased her. "Your face looks weird when you're sad."

She felt her cheeks grow hot. "Stop looking at my face all the time."

"What am I supposed to look at? Your feet?"

She turned her back on him, wondering why a boy she'd only met twice could get her so worked up, could make her feel so much in such a short amount of time. She decided not to think about it. "I have a question before I go. Can things only be dropped off at your village on days like today? When did my Grandpa visit?"

He sounded happier at this change of topic. "Anytime really. We can find things whenever. We just can't, you know...pick them up when you're there?"

"So you're...invisible?"

He chuckled. "I guess you could say that. I don't know, stop by tomorrow. You'll see."

Aiba made it all sound so normal, but Shihori supposed that was because this sort of life seemed normal to him. Matsuo Village and its strange curse was his normal everyday existence.

"Well maybe I'll bring you something. I don't know when I'll visit again, but I can leave stuff for you whenever I visit Grandma."

"You don't have to do that," he said, making her turn around. His smile was so bright she couldn't look away. "But if you do, it'll make us happy. Just like your Grandpa."

She said goodbye, not wanting to keep him from his TV and his last few hours. It was strange, seeing the boy in front of her and thinking he'd be impossible to see the next day. He gave her a wave and a "see ya later, Shihori-sama" before turning to run after Nino.

She and Maki biked back to the house, telling their parents of an uneventful day in town. Book stores and sundaes and not much else to say. But when they went to bed that night, still tucked in the old futons from when their parents were young, she and Maki talked excitedly about their strange day until their voices grew scratchy and sleep claimed them.

When they woke the next day they had breakfast and made their excuses, taking the bikes out and going the same roundabout way to Matsuo Village.

The buildings were there, still on the hills, but things had changed. The misty fog nearly engulfed the whole town, and there were no signs of life. No children in the courtyards, no people in the streets. She and Maki slowly walked down the main street of town. The sight of the place now sent a shiver down her spine.

The apartment blocks were deteriorated. Stairwells had collapsed, windows were broken. Everything was covered in dust and rubble. Block 8 was impossible to enter - the door was locked, and the ceiling had caved in at the other entryway. The stores were empty, the floors covered in shattered glass and empty grocery bags. Officer Katori's police box was ransacked, and the roof was half missing. The weeds that had poked out of the streets the day before were a wild garden, growing and climbing up the walls. Rats ran in and out of cracks in the cement block buildings. Birds picked around in mounds of garbage.

There was no Aiba-kun, no Nino. No Eiko-san and Jun and Mirei. No Officer Katori. The day before, Matsuo Village had been alive, the remaining people living as best they could with what they had. How had it grown so ruined overnight? The curse was real, and the place was dangerous.

When Shihori turned around, she saw tears in Maki's eyes, her hand over her mouth in shock. They hadn't dreamed yesterday up, it was impossible. They'd had lunch here, had watched the baseball game. Shihori remembered sitting on the bike and letting Aiba pedal, feeling the worn cotton of his t-shirt as she held onto him tightly.

Maki ran, heading back for the valley and the comfort of the trees and Grandma's house beyond. Shihori let her go, spending a few minutes more in the village, desperate to find any traces of life. Instead a giant black bird cawed at her from where he was perched atop a tall wooden pole that had once had power lines tethered to it. She could feel tears pricking her own eyes.

She made it to the edge of town, tears streaming silently down her cheeks, before it happened. It was cold, so much colder without people here, but suddenly there was warmth, like fingers tugging at her wrist.

She whirled around, looking left and looking right. "Aiba-kun?" she whispered into the chilly air, her voice shaking.

Nothing. Nobody. Just the bird staring her down from the other side of town. 

\--

Grandpa's words followed Shihori through junior high. Not to enter the forest, that she'd only regret it. She regretted it, if only because she couldn't see Eiko-san, her son, or his friends. The thought of the day in Matsuo and Hachimantai haunted her, images and memories flashing in her dreams often.

It haunted her cousin too. It was after Christmas, at the turn of the year after their joint visit to Matsuo, that she started receiving handwritten letters from Maki regularly. They started out normally enough, with Maki talking about school, her life in Kyushu, taking a cooking class with her mother at the community center. But eventually Matsuo Village came up and started taking over the cousins' letters back and forth.

They speculated about the curse. Shihori's parents bought her a computer for her fourteenth birthday to use for school, but instead she spent hours trying to find any evidence of Matsuo Village. She only found websites talking about abandoned buildings, the ones she saw on the hills, the ones that had decayed so badly. There was little information about the place, a company town that had been under construction and never actually inhabited. This was a lie, Shihori was certain of it, but nobody talked about it on message boards or websites. People just wondered if it was haunted, or geeked out about visiting the place and snapping photos but nobody actually did.

She shared her limited findings with Maki. Even as her cousin grew older, getting more involved at school with student council and sports, she always made time to write Shihori letters. "I wonder what Nino and Aiba-kun are doing today?" Maki would write, and then she'd answer her own question. Baseball or basketball, chasing each other around the valley and telling stupid jokes. It was Maki's opinion that Matsuo Village was still there and the place they'd seen, the ruins, was the real illusion from the curse.

Shihori didn't know what to believe. She'd seen Matsuo Village, but she'd also seen what was left the next day. How solid and real it had been too. 

They visited Grandma's place in the summertime, and when Shihori was fifteen her parents let her take the train up north on her own without them. Sadly her cousin didn't go at the same time. Maki had reported during her spring break that the ruins were the same as always, but that she'd left a basket of freshly baked cookies and other sweets on one day and returned the next to find the basket empty. Shihori suspected the blackbirds and rats, but Maki was certain that Nino and his friends had come for the treats.

Aiba-kun had even said she could leave things for them any time. She decided to test the theory herself. After a long morning helping Grandma clean, she left the older woman to her afternoon TV soap operas and headed out to the storage shed. Grandpa's old wheelbarrow was there, the one he'd apparently used to bring supplies to Matsuo Village.

She loaded it up with the magazines cluttering up Grandma's table, saying she was taking them off to be recycled. She'd also packed her suitcase half full of manga from home. It had been a real pain to get on and off the trains with it, but she decided it was worth it. Once the wheelbarrow was heavy with her donations, she took off into the woods.

It was miserable, hot even under the trees. This summer was seeing a heat wave, even north in Iwate where it rarely got that way. She was sweaty and disgusting and bug-bitten before she even made it to the valley. It had taken her twice as long as she'd anticipated, not really remembering how steep the pathway was downward. She'd nearly toppled the wheelbarrow a dozen times and had lost two of the old fashion magazines that had probably been her mother's.

Even with the summer sunshine Matsuo Village was still shrouded in its mysterious fog. She huffed and puffed, wishing she was as athletic as her cousin. Maki ran track at her junior high school while Shihori had simply grown lazier over the years. She'd gotten a little plump, spending hours with manga or on her computer checking for new evidence about Matsuo Village. The wheelbarrow nearly got away from her and she had to almost run with it down into the valley. How had Grandpa managed this for so long? 

She then had to push the wheelbarrow back up the town hill, almost glad that nobody was around to see her. There were still birds and rats, and she bit her lip to try to not freak out. Where would be the best place to leave things? Were the people of Matsuo Village here, seeing her wheel in the books? There had been no library that she could remember, and there certainly wasn't one in the ruins.

The best kept building was Block 3, one of the first buildings that ringed the town. Despite all the decay, the door still opened and closed firmly and hadn't been locked. She could smell rot when she tugged it open, hurrying to pull her shirt up to cover her nose. Animals had been living in here, or maybe they still were. It smelled like their waste. But they hopefully would leave the books alone if she brought them up higher.

Leaving the wheelbarrow at the bottom of the staircase, still intact and without any debris, she went up and down the stairs with armfuls of books, leaving them on the second floor landing in piles. It didn't smell as bad up here. Maybe the animals left this floor alone, having made their homes well enough at ground level. She was reminded of the passageway in Block 8, remembering the sound of Eiko-san's keys jangling as she led them to the Aiba family's apartment.

It only urged her on, still sweating, but moving the books and magazines until her wheelbarrow was empty. She wished she'd brought a snack or even a water bottle, pushing the wheelbarrow out of the building and sitting down against the wall, leaning her head back against the concrete.

It had been quite the undertaking, but she wouldn't know until tomorrow if it had done any good. She shut her eyes, taking in the quiet. It had always been quiet in Iwate. It was always such a contrast from Tokyo, the absence of honking car horns and trains rattling down the tracks. There was only the wind rushing through the trees, the sounds of birds. It was even quieter in Matsuo, and she easily lost herself in thinking about some of the stories she and Maki wrote back and forth.

Their written letters, speculating what their Matsuo Village friends did to occupy their time, had become more complex over the years. Shihori found herself imagining she was in Matsuo too, pumping water from the well, playing baseball in the valley. She was fifteen now and Aiba-kun and his friends were eighteen. In the world Shihori really lived in, they'd be graduating from high school, getting jobs or preparing to go to university. But what sort of future did the people of Matsuo Village dream about? Did they want to stay or leave?

Sometimes when Shihori was feeling down, she remembered Aiba-kun's teasing, the mocking way he'd called her "Shihori-sama." When the girls in school found notes in their lockers, handed out chocolates to boys on Valentine's Day, Shihori didn't participate as much as she could have. She made chocolates for the most popular boys in class as a courtesy, not expecting any result. She found herself wishing she could make chocolates for Aiba-kun and his friends, the people who'd actually appreciate them. She passed notes for her friends, arranged group meet-ups at cafes and the shopping center, and then took a step back. 

She was certain of it now - even if she'd only seen him twice at age nine and age twelve, Shihori was certain that none of the other boys in school could compare to Aiba-kun. To his goofy laugh and his weird smile. Even if she'd only seen him those two times, she and Maki had spent the last three years wondering about him and his friends. Imagining entire years' worth of activities for them. Shihori suspected that she spent even more time pondering it than her cousin did. It was silly, but she'd created an Aiba-kun in her mind that was so perfect that she didn't really mind if the boys at school just wanted to be friends, only took her aside privately so they could ask her to pass along feelings to one of her friends.

Boys could come and go, Shihori decided, but she'd always have Matsuo Village and Aiba-kun waiting with a smirk to walk her through the woods.

\--

When she returned the next day, itching at the mosquito bites dotting her legs, her heart swelled when she went to Block 3 and found the piles gone. Not ransacked by animals, but all of it gone. Given a home.

She smiled, running out into the middle of the town, arms outstretched. "See!" she called out, "See, now you've got your manga, so you can't complain!"

This became Shihori's new routine. She spent more and more time with Grandma, using all of her school breaks during high school to take the train north and bring new manga. During spring break and summer, she toted things up north. The spending money her parents gave her to use in town went to buy sacks of rice, tins of preserved vegetables. New pots and pans and utensils she had to hide in the storage shed until she could bring them to the village and not let Grandma find out. Bags full of clothes from secondhand shops with new buttons Shihori sewed on herself diligently in the small bedroom with the old futon.

And each time without fail the items had been claimed the next day. Matsuo Village really was there, Aiba-kun was there and she was helping him.

She turned sixteen, she turned seventeen. She returned to the northern greenery, to the house among the cedars. Panda the mutt died peacefully in his sleep of old age, Grandma and Shihori by his side. Otherwise Iwate remained largely unchanged. And every time she came home from Iwate, Tokyo seemed too loud, too crowded. People with the newest fashions, the newest books. Fast food and cup noodles and studying endlessly for university entrance exams. 

She still went out with her friends occasionally, but they accused her of growing distant. Complained that she spent too much time in her room, too much time not going to the department store to get makeup samples at the designer counters, too much time skipping out on school events. "We've got the perfect guy for you," her friends always moaned. "But he definitely wouldn't want some weirdo who stays locked up in her room!"

Her parents joined in, wondering why she stayed in so much, messing around on the computer, fabric all over the floor for the next batch of clothes she planned to sneak up north. "Look at your cousin Maki. She's excelling in school!" Her cousin Maki had grown up totally perfect, always making time for Shihori's increasingly lengthy letters and speculation, but still having good grades and throwing herself into her school activities with enthusiasm. All around, Maki was wonderful and Shihori was a hermit with a sewing machine.

Shihori graduated high school with little fanfare, having decided to put off university. She knew that her parents found her odd, had been concerned about her for years now. Perhaps they thought something terrible had happened to her that day in the woods, the day they believed she'd made up everything about Matsuo Village and what she'd seen. Something had happened, of course, but it wasn't what they thought.


	3. Chapter 3

She took a part-time job at a fabric store and finally went out on a few dates with someone who worked in the bakery next door to the store, although by now her high school friends had mostly moved on to new friends at university and didn't waste time trying to perk up her love life. 

Ohno-kun was sweet and quiet and didn't mind that Shihori liked lots of time to herself. He picked her up after work from his own job at the bakery, and they had cheap meals together, took long walks. He waited three months to kiss her, behind a shrine in the neighborhood during a warm spring night. He smelled like freshly baked rolls and tasted a bit like one too, but somehow it didn't feel right. 

He was short while Aiba-kun had been tall. He was quiet where Aiba had been brash and noisy. He was over 20 and bought them beers one night. They sat down on the riverbank, drinking and kissing, and she found herself telling Ohno-kun about Matsuo Village, about the people there and her experiences, about her Grandpa's warning the night he passed away. About leaving the books and supplies and how they disappeared.

Ohno-kun only nodded, leaning in to kiss her again. "That's a good story," he said, running his thumb along her jaw. "Are you writing a book or something?"

He hadn't been listening at all. Or he thought she'd made it all up. The beer settled in her stomach, her tongue bitter with its taste. She'd opened up to him, and he'd been as skeptical as everyone else. Well, she couldn't blame him. It did sound ridiculous. But the experience, opening her heart only for her truth to be brushed aside, hurt. 

She made excuses before finally telling him one evening after a year of seeing each other that maybe they were better as friends. He only nodded his usual quiet nod, wishing her the very best and encouraging her once again that she should write stories. He was even kind enough to wait a full month before asking her co-worker at the fabric store, Satomi, on a date. They were a better match anyhow. Satomi didn't have a village in Iwate depending on her.

She went back into her routine, the hours she spent in Ohno-kun's company now used to improve her sewing. Her feelings for Matsuo Village grew stronger and stronger. As the weeks passed, she looked back fondly on her experiences with Ohno. He'd changed her life in a way that only became apparent once he had moved on - he'd told her to write.

So she did. She had boxes and boxes of letters under her bed, all the letters she and Maki had mailed back and forth over the years before finally turning to email when Maki's school life grew busy. Years of correspondence, years of hopes, dreams, and jokes about Matsuo Village and the people who lived there. She found herself typing them up, elaborating on the ideas. Soon it took on a life of its own. Shihori sat in front of her screen, smiling. Nobody believed her about Matsuo Village anyway. So why not make it into "fiction" for others to read?

She went to message boards, looked into publishing houses. She couldn't live on a part-timer's pay forever, and all her letters with Maki had strengthened her confidence in writing. She'd make Matsuo Village a novel. She'd change the names, create an elaborate story about the cursed town. It was all too easy - she had everything she needed already. If she sold the book, she could use the money she made to keep supporting the village.

It was just before Christmas, just after Shihori's twentieth birthday, that she had a decent draft ready to submit to a list of publishers. But it was just before Christmas, just after Shihori's twentieth birthday, that her Grandma passed away.

\--

There wasn't much room in the bedroom for two grown girls, but she and Maki insisted on sharing even though they didn't have to. Grandma had lasted ten full years without stubborn, kind-hearted Grandpa, but they were finally reunited. The ache was different this time. She would miss Grandma terribly, her warmth and friendliness even after losing Grandpa. But she was happy knowing the two of them were together once more.

Maki would graduate high school in the spring and was planning to move to Tokyo for university. Maybe she and Shihori could get an apartment to share? "But what about this house?" Shihori asked her cousin's shape in the dark. "Now that Grandma's gone, my mom and your dad will want to sell it."

Maki was quiet then. They both knew it was true. Having Grandma here had been excuse enough for visits throughout their teen years. How could they help Matsuo Village if they didn't have Grandma's house as a home base? Had it really been eight years since that day? Shihori could still taste the rice and miso Eiko-san had kindly made for them. She could still remember the feeling of the wind in her hair as Aiba-kun pedaled the bike into town. 

"Maybe you should take the house, Shii-chan," Maki whispered. "Maybe you should live up here."

To anyone else, Maki's blunt suggestion would have sounded a bit cold, as though it was obvious she had nothing better to do than give up her life in Tokyo to live up here in the north all alone. But Kanjiya Shihori had changed. Even if nobody believed her, even if she'd be an even worse hermit than her parents had always dreaded, she had a duty to Matsuo. So long as there were people to take the things she donated, if there was even one single person she could help, wasn't it worth it? Even if her memories of Aiba-kun had set him on this unreal pedestal, it wasn't the only reason she came north.

She waited until after the funeral to approach her parents, Uncle Taku, and Aunt Marina. They sat around the table in the living room, feet toasty under the kotatsu, while she laid out her plans to move north and live in Grandma's house. She mentioned the novel she was writing, how she'd be able to concentrate better away from Tokyo. 

"But what about university?" her father asked, still hoping that she'd give up the part-timer life and go to the same college he'd attended. Her writing was just a hobby like her sewing, surely.

"But what about all your friends?" her Aunt Marina asked, not really knowing that Shihori didn't have many.

"It's too lonely here for a girl alone. And cold," her mother protested, remembering why she'd left Iwate so many years ago and assuming those reasons would be the same for anyone else.

Uncle Taku, though, sipped his tea and was quiet. She'd seen him walking around the house earlier that day, his fingertips drifting along the wooden posts. Then he'd bundled up in his coat, standing outside by the pond and smoking, his eyes drifting along as though he was memorizing every tree, every blade of grass. Maki had hinted that her father would be sad if the house sold to strangers, but he wouldn't admit it. The money to be gained from a sale would help both families. The older the house got, the more upkeep would cost.

The adults said they'd think about it, and Maki dragged Shihori from the house, pulled her to her family's car and insisted they go to town and have fun. It was odd now, seeing Maki take charge after Shihori had been so bossy to her when they were young. Her cousin was a bit taller than her now, slim and pretty. Smart and sensible. Every time Shihori teased her about Nino, about the boy she'd been drawn to so easily that day, Maki just laughed. She didn't do long-distance relationships. That fact, however, didn't stop Shihori from daydreaming about one of her own.

They went for karaoke, mostly letting the music play and the lights drift across their faces. They chatted about Grandma and Grandpa, about the house, about Matsuo Village. She squeezed her cousin's hand and tried not to cry. After all this time, all these years, only Maki could really understand her. Only Maki believed.

"You're twenty now," Maki said. "They can't keep you away. House or no house, if you want to be here, Shii, then be here."

They drove back, and the adults had already gone to bed. Only Uncle Taku was waiting for them in the living room, nursing a beer and offering a gentle smile. Maki made excuses and headed for bed, but Shihori found herself sitting down under the kotatsu. She and her uncle had never been close, but he looked at her with such kindness that she already seemed to know what he was going to say.

"I grew up in this house, and I hated it back then," Uncle Taku murmured, chuckling softly. "We were so far from everything, you know. All my friends lived in town, Papa was always at the mine. I couldn't wait to leave. I took the first job a company offered me, I married Marina, I moved to the other end of the country. Maybe it just comes with getting older. When you're young you want to leave, but when you're older you can't even understand those feelings you once had. You get nostalgic."

She slipped an orange from the bowl on the table, peeling it to let her uncle continue on without feeling the pressure of her full attention.

"With Mama passing, it's like a door has closed. But Shii-chan, it's like you're here with a key. Like you're willing to open it again." He tapped the beer can against the table lightly. "What the hell am I talking about?"

"I don't know," she said, even though she did know. She knew exactly.

"We can make do without the money," he decided firmly. "So many people are quick to look at their accounts before their memories. My parents never wanted that for me. Everybody from my generation ran away from Iwate, but my parents wouldn't leave. Even when they closed the mine, my father wouldn't leave, and he never said why."

Shihori knew why Grandpa hadn't left. She knew it all too well.

"Maybe it skipped a generation in our family," Uncle Taku said. "You and Maki are crazy about this old place, and just because we hated it doesn't make that a universal truth." He looked up at her. "We'll sign it over in your name first thing in the morning. But you have to promise not to complain. Being a homeowner isn't something to undertake lightly. This house is going to be your responsibility, Shii-chan."

She held out a piece of the orange in her palm. "Thank you, Uncle Taku." 

He accepted it with a wink. "Take good care of the place."

\--

Her mother was upset and had apparently been the lone dissenting voice. She would never understand Shihori's feelings for Iwate, and she never would. They parted with some tension, and her father did most of the coordination for her move. By the end of January, when the house was covered in snow, Shihori had fully moved in. Her father even took some time off work to help install newer faucets and fixtures for her, tinkering around with the bathroom and kitchen to bring it a little more up to date.

When he left, he could only tell her to be happy and to call her mother often.

The winter was hard on her. She'd used her small savings from the fabric store to buy a tiny car that brought her back and forth from town so she could buy things for herself as well as for Matsuo. The car stalled over and over again, leaving her shivering in the cold waiting for the town mechanic to come and help. She got sick countless times after trudging through thigh-deep snow to bring food to the village. She lost weight, sniffling and sneezing as she watched blurry TV Asahi come through on the one good channel.

Having Internet access installed in the old house was nearly impossible, so she worked on her stories and contacted publishers using the ancient computers of the town library. She received rejection after rejection, finally getting a job as a cashier at the town grocery store to keep herself afloat.

The winter was hard and she missed the easy living and convenience of Tokyo. But she'd never been happier, had never felt closer to Matsuo Village. Maki sent her letters, full of her excitement. She'd gotten accepted to the university of her choice in Tokyo. Maki promised to come up to keep her company on breaks, and hopefully in November as well. This would be their first chance in years. Their first chance to see their friends again in nine years.

As the snows melted, life got a little less difficult. She could bike into town again, and she made friends with some of the other women at the grocery store. She never told them about Matsuo, staying content with listening to stories about their boyfriends or their husbands, about babies on the way. Between writing and working and bringing things to the village, the year passed quickly.

She was in a bit of a panic when November finally arrived. Maki was coming north, and together they planned an exciting day for anyone in Matsuo Village who wanted to come. They were going to host a party at the house. Maki was cooking and Shihori was going to serve as hostess. It was going to be a grand reunion. She hand-made invitations, enclosing them in the books she left in the village during October.

But it had been so long. She had ideas of how the Matsuo Village residents had grown and changed. She had images of them that she'd spent years perfecting. Eiko-san was still a lovely woman but now with a streak of gray in her hair. The boys had grown up, and they were tall and muscled and ridiculously handsome. But surely she was wrong on some counts. And what would that be like? If she had expectations for them, maybe they had expectations for her as well.

She stared at herself in the mirror. She'd grown up - still not very tall. Was her hair okay? What about the rest of her? When they'd last seen her, she was twelve. Now she was almost twenty-one, a woman grown. As much a stranger as they'd be to her. She found herself worried about Aiba-kun. She'd spent half her life with this odd crush on him, comparing everyone she met to him. But what if he didn't like her that way? What if he'd just want to be friends? Or nothing at all? What could even happen in the span of a day?

\--

Maki arrived full of cheer in November, toting along her own favorite spices to use for the grand meal. Neither of them knew how many people still lived in Matsuo, but Shihori's discount at the grocery store let them stock up to feed at least twenty people. 

The university life suited her cousin quite well. She had a boyfriend and had cut her hair short. She hummed in the kitchen the night before their visit to the village, stirring pots and pans full of delicious things that Shihori struggled not to try. They decorated the main room of the house with flowers, scrubbing cobwebs out of corners and between the pair of them they made a glittery mess of a banner that read "Welcome Matsuo Village Friends!" and hung it up. 

They knelt in front of the family altar, praying and chatting with Grandma and Grandpa. They apologized to Grandma for all the mess, told Grandpa they wished he could attend. 

When morning came, it was chilly and cloudy, but the forest was painted bright red and yellow with fall color. She finally dragged Maki away from the kitchen before noon and they went directly into the forest, racing around like a pair of silly kids. Shihori's stomach was still twisted and knotted with worry, but her cousin's enthusiasm and eagerness helped her along.

When they made it to the edge of the woods, her cousin let out a rare shout, waving her arms. "Hello!" she cried, voice carrying out across the valley.

They were already coming, a small mass of people shapes walking down the road since Shihori had set the invites for lunchtime to give the villagers time to enjoy the rest of the day. They were really coming! They were coming!

The cousins hurried down the hill to meet the group in the valley. As they drew closer, they discovered there were no more than a dozen people, but their faces were smiling and they waved happily. "Kanjiya-san!" they shouted. "Horikita-san!"

Shihori almost felt like crying. They were wearing the clothes she'd given them, they were carrying the books she'd brought. They were shouting her name and Maki's too. 

She saw Jun and Mirei at the front. Jun had grown tall and filled out. He'd been rather thin as a fifteen year old but now at twenty-four he was handsome, broad-shouldered, and carried himself proudly. Mirei was pretty and all smiles, racing ahead with her arms out. She got to Maki first, wrapping her up in a strong hug.

Shihori soon found herself the center of attention. There were teenagers who towered over her who had been small children the last time she'd seen them, but they knew her on sight, showing off their clothes, bragging of their full bellies thanks to all the food she brought diligently. Officer Katori was out of uniform, kitted out in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt she'd left behind.

She felt embarrassed, hearing all the thank yous, being embraced by the small group like she was a member of the village herself. Finally there was a tap on her shoulder, and she turned to find someone not much taller than her, but with that mole on his chin in its usual place.

His eyes were tired, his face was pale, and he was as thin as he'd always been but he held out his arms. "Well, if it isn't the infamous Shihori-sama."

"Nino!" She nearly collapsed against him, laughing and crying, feeling the warmth and solidity of him. The last time she'd seen him had been his back as he ran off to watch TV in Hachimantai, but nine years could have been nine seconds. 

He rubbed her back, whispering quietly in her ear. "You've been our angel. Our guardian angel. Thank you."

"Come now, we can't all just stand around here when there's a meal waiting," came a voice Shihori knew instantly. Nino let her go, inclining his head and going off to greet her cousin. She turned, astonished by how close to the mark all of her imaginings had been.

Eiko-san was aging gracefully, still possessing the long, thin limbs her son had inherited. Her hair had grayed, and she had a few more wrinkles, but she was still beautiful. She wrapped Shihori up in a tight hug, pressing a kiss to her hair.

"Eiko-san..."

"My sweet girl," she murmured, carding her fingers through Shihori's hair. She felt twelve years old again, waiting for lunch. She felt safe.

"I'm so happy you got my invite."

The older woman laughed. "We wouldn't have missed it for the world. Do you have any idea how long it's been since any of us have had a meal like this?" She leaned back, addressing the others. "Let's all get a move on!" she told the group, and everyone headed for the forest.

Jun and Mirei stood on either side of Maki, linking arms and heading for the trees. The rest of the group followed Officer Katori's lead, marching along after them. It was then that Shihori counted the group. Counted Nino's back as he trailed behind Maki and the others. Counted Officer Katori, a few older residents, the children who were now in their teens.

Somebody was missing.

Eiko-san took her hand and pulled her along, her own eyes brimming with unshed tears. "He's not here. I'm so very sorry, but he's not here."

\--

There hadn't been so many people in the house since Grandma had passed away. Shihori busied herself with helping Maki, scooping heaps of food onto the haphazard collection of plates in the kitchen. Eiko-san corraled everyone in the main room, and the teenagers took over Shihori's small stereo, laughing at some of the strange pop music that came crying out of the speakers.

Maki was never more in her element, bustling from pot to pot, making sure everyone got enough to eat. Nino stayed in the kitchen with her, sneaking a taste from every plate with a wicked grin. Jun poured drinks, arranging them on trays. Shihori carried plates into the room. The older residents had gathered around her table while the younger ones were content to sit with their plates on their laps, bobbing their heads to the music and laughing.

Eiko-san knelt before the family altar, her head bowed low. For the very first time, she'd been able to come and pay her respects to Grandpa.

Everyone was so happy that Shihori didn't dare show her disappointment. Eiko-san had explained things on the walk to the house. Aiba-kun was away, had been for two years. It wasn't the first time either. When they'd turned eighteen, he and Nino and Jun had all gone off together to work and explore. Nino had been the first to return a year later, standing right outside Matsuo Village on a cold November night waiting for home to reappear. Jun and Aiba had returned together at age twenty, tall and tan and with dozens of ridiculous stories to tell Nino.

But the wanderlust that hadn't really taken hold of Nino or Jun had truly taken over her son. The three young men had been from one end of Japan to the other, from Hokkaido to Okinawa and back again. They'd seen more of Japan than Shihori ever had. With Matsuo Village off the grid, they had no identification, no real existence. They hitchhiked, they took odd jobs that didn't ask questions. They experienced the world that had been denied to them, freely and without expectations.

Nino had returned because Matsuo was home. Jun had returned, Eiko-san admitted, because Mirei was home for him. Even now the two of them sat close together, Mirei chuckling as Jun wolfed down Maki's food. As for Aiba-kun, his mother explained, he'd always been so devoted to the village but getting out had changed him. He'd asked her permission to leave two years earlier, promising that one day he'd return, that he'd use his time outside to make enough money to support the village.

And she'd let him go, let him leave. Shihori had been petrified for months about the Aiba Masaki she would encounter on this November afternoon. But it had been needless worry entirely. Aiba had gone, and nobody knew when he was coming back.

She picked at her food, getting up to refill plates and glasses. When the meal was over, the older residents spoke to her one by one, shaking her hands, wishing for her happiness and health. She teared up at the sentiments, telling them to leave requests whenever they wished and she'd do her best to see them through. The younger kids were told the same thing, and they peppered her with wishes for portable DVD players and game units until Eiko-san finally scolded them.

Nino, Maki, Jun, and Mirei had made impulsive plans for an evening in town, and they asked Shihori to join them. A double date with herself as wheel number five. She made excuses about cleaning the kitchen, about working on her novel, but they dragged her along anyhow.

The five of them somehow fit into Shihori's tiny car. Shihori sat behind the wheel with Maki at her side. Mirei sat on Jun's lap in the back, and Nino met her eyes in the rearview mirror. He seemed to understand her feelings, nodding his apologies as she drove them to karaoke.

Maki was still underage, but that didn't stop the now worldly Matsumoto Jun and Ninomiya Kazunari from buying rounds of drinks and encouraging her to try them. Shihori passed, reminding them all who had to drive them home. Mirei tugged Shihori to her feet, insisting they duet on a song though Mirei didn't know anything in the catalog and was more content to just bang a tambourine against her hip while Shihori mumbled her way through song after song.

As the drinking went on, Jun and Mirei made excuses to leave. They blushed and looked nervous. Even with the emptiness of Matsuo Village, they probably didn't get much time to themselves. They departed with hugs and thank yous for Shihori, and she hoped they'd be able to get back to the village in time.

The alcohol made her cousin sleepy, and it was 10:00 PM when they left the karaoke place behind. Nino was smaller than most men Shihori had met, but he hoisted her cousin easily and piggy-backed her to the car. They settled Maki in the backseat, giggling a little when she started to snore. Nino joined her up front for the ride back to the house.

It was empty when they returned, and Nino helped again, carrying Maki into the bedroom and tucking her under the covers. Nino followed Shihori back to the living room. 

"We see you, okay," Nino admitted, still a little buzzed from his drinks. His voice was a bit slurred but his eyes were serious. "Every single time you've come, we see you. We watched you grow up. We talk to you, but we know you can't hear us. He always talked to you, followed you like a creep. He thought he was really clever with some of the ways he teased you."

Shihori didn't have to ask. She knew Nino was talking about Aiba-kun. They sat down at the table. She wasn't sure she wanted to hear this, now that she knew they'd seen her more than she'd ever seen them. "I wish I could talk to you. All of you." She gestured around. "This is my house now at least. I get to visit whenever I want."

"And it means everything, it really does," he said. "We don't even have words for how thankful we are."

"Well I'm happy to be useful."

"You're more than useful," Nino insisted. "You're necessary. Without you we wouldn't have made it. Masaki knows that."

She looked down, shrugging a bit. "If things truly got tough, surely you'd all leave." Just like him, she almost said, but held her tongue. Aiba leaving Matsuo made sense. Anyone leaving Matsuo made sense.

"He left two years ago," Nino said. "If he knew you lived here now, he'd race back, I just know it."

There was no way to know if he was being truthful. If Nino was just telling her what she wanted to hear. He seemed to sense, though, that she was hurt and that she didn't want to say it aloud. That she wanted to see Aiba, to hear his voice. To see if Aiba at twenty-four was as kind and sweet as Nino at twenty-four, as Jun was. To see if Aiba at twenty-four was compatible with Shihori at twenty-one, Shihori who still remembered the day he'd run into her as though it was yesterday.

He changed the subject, finally taking his own turn to look embarrassed. "Your cousin leaves me letters, you know."

She looked up, shocked. "She what?"

He chuckled a bit, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, the ones with the cute teddy bear on the butt pocket that she'd stitched up more with Mirei-san in mind. He unfolded a piece of paper. "To Ninomiya-san," it read, and Shihori didn't dare read any further.

"She's left a note for me, and just for me, since the first time she visited by herself. With the cookies." Nino stared at the letter. "She told us about you, about her life, about all sorts of odd things. She filled in the blanks since we could only see you and there was no way for you to hear us."

Shihori stared at the piece of paper. "She never told me any of this. She tells me everything and she never told me this." It hurt, knowing there was a whole piece of Maki's life she'd never been party to. She told Maki everything, even her silly, foolish feelings for Aiba-kun.

"I could never write back, of course. We didn't really have pens and paper lying around. And what was I going to say? I'm five years older than her, so for the first several years that was extremely weird. And she always wrote to me like a friend. But, well..."

Realization dawned on Shihori. She saw Nino in a new light. The way he'd been gently watching her cousin all day. "You care about her."

Nino nodded. "I know she has a boyfriend at school. She told me all about him in her last letter." He snorted a bit. "She's really honest, huh?"

Shihori couldn't help laughing too. "The most honest person I know, save for the whole writing you letters for years bit."

"So I don't know, I really don't know," Nino admitted. "But if you leave some stuff to write with, I'll leave them out for her. Maybe you could mail them for me? I know a letter can't compete with a flesh and blood Tokyo boyfriend, but if anything, I'm a patient guy. Comes with where I live, right?"

She easily agreed. Shihori had always been so much better at playing matchmaker than at being the one matched. She dug through her cabinets, finding a bundle of mechanical pencils and sketch pads that had been her Grandpa's. Nino gave her a hug, telling her that everything would be okay. That his friend would come back someday.

She wanted to believe him, standing on the porch and watching Nino hurry off toward the trees, hollering his goodbyes. 

Out of habit, she and a slightly hungover Maki wandered down to the village the following morning, finding the usual rot and decay, the lifelessness that made up the Matsuo ruins 364 days a year. But this time, sitting right at the entrance to town, was a very much out of place upside-down box that had once contained a case of freeze-dried noodles.

Maki upended the box to find the very first letter from Nino addressed to "the honorable Horikita-san," and Shihori had never seen her smile so big.

\--

The winter was long again, colder, and she spent half of the time sick. A co-worker had a baby, and for the first time in her life Shihori felt a true pang of longing, holding the drooling, squirming little baby bundle in her arms. For a family of her own. To take care of people in person every day of the year instead of pushing a wheelbarrow full of sacks of rice. For a tiny little hand to hold as they walked through the forest.

The constant letters back and forth between Nino and Maki didn't help. She never read them, not once, although sometimes Nino wrote messages on the envelopes for her. "Katori-san is out of razors. If you please..." "Eiko-san won't say, but I think she needs new shoes." "You looked tired when you stopped in the other day. Are you getting enough sleep?"

As spring blossomed, everything seemed to be blossoming around her. Maki's messages from Tokyo contained next to nothing about her supposed boyfriend and much more about Nino instead. The strange adventures he and Aiba and Jun had gotten up to on their "study abroad" excursion as they called it. It seemed that Maki's strong beliefs about long-distance relationships were waning. 

Mirei and Jun, Nino wrote to her in April, intended to marry and Shihori took one of the rings out of Grandma's old jewelry box and had it sized in town before sneaking it into one of her food deliveries to the village, care of Matsumoto Jun. She received a lengthy and ridiculously cute letter of appreciation from Jun, saying he was the happiest man on Earth and that he owed Shihori big time for her help.

Co-worker babies thrived, Hachimantai woke up from winter, and even her writing career started to show promise. After so many rejections, Shihori had almost forgotten about the query letter she'd sent along to a small publisher called Kisarazu Press. They didn't have the room for another novel on their schedule this year, but if Shihori trimmed things down, she was welcome to be published in a monthly serial of short stories that Kisarazu distributed in independent bookstores. She'd be one among twenty writers every month, but that suited her just fine.

She emailed back and forth with her newly assigned editor and manager, Sakurai Sho-san, whose enthusiasm for Mako Village (her chosen moniker) nearly matched her own. He was a rather harsh editor, exacting and strict, but he whipped her stories into shape, helped her make things stronger. By the time November rolled around, she had four monthly editions of the Kisarazu Mystery Tales serial to show for it. Four stories of Mako Village and its mysterious curse.

Maki came north once again, and despite Shihori's protests, the Matsuo Village party this year was also to be a joint celebration for Shihori's achievements. The village already knew about Shihori's stories, thanks to the ongoing letter campaign between Nino and Maki. Though Shihori had bought her share of copies, a giant box of them, postmarked from Maki's address in Tokyo, arrived at her doorstep a day before Maki did. It had to be expensive on a student's budget.

While Maki cooked, she kept checking in on Shihori, who had been ordered to autograph copies for each person in town. She was embarrassed at the thought of people in Matsuo reading mostly about themselves, but she signed the books anyway to satisfy her cousin.

When they met the villagers the following day, they discovered that not only was this to be a joint Matsuo and Shihori celebration, but Jun and Mirei had news as well. As Grandma's ring sparkled on Mirei's thin finger, she and Jun announced to everyone gathered in the house that Mirei was expecting a baby. For Mirei's health and the baby's as well, the couple had decided to leave Matsuo and start a new life together as a family elsewhere.

Where Shihori had expected people to be sad at their departure, there was nothing but joy. Wasn't it exciting, Eiko-san was telling everyone. Please send pictures! Shihori insisted that Jun and Mirei stay with her until they could find their own way, and they happily accepted. Finally the teenagers cranked up the stereo and the celebration truly began.

Shihori cleaned up the plates, moving to the kitchen with a bit of a spring in her step. Much as she had grown used to her own company, it would be fun to have Jun and Mirei in the house. She supposed it wasn't as much fun for the couple, but Shihori was thrilled to have people to dote on. Plus she could have two new people to read her stories before she sent them off to Sakurai-san and his zero tolerance for grammatical mistakes policy.

She noticed that two people were missing, and she couldn't help grinning. Unlike the previous year, where Nino had been so quiet and her cousin otherwise occupied with the party, Nino and Maki had been inseparable since that morning. Before the celebration began, the two had gone for a walk alone in the woods, both returning with rather satisfied smirks and not an ounce of shame. Love was in the air all around her.

The day wound down, and the second Matsuo Village annual dinner was finished. Shihori accompanied Eiko-san back to the village, walking together through the woods arm in arm. "Maybe you should stay and see it this time," Eiko-san said. "I've never seen it from the other side, but Nino has. And Jun-kun." The words 'and so has Masaki' went unsaid. Another year had gone by without word of her son, and Eiko-san had a few more worry wrinkles near her eyes.

She hugged the older woman goodbye, watching her trudge up the hill and back toward the nearly empty apartment blocks. She said they all lived in the same one now for company and conversation. Shihori waved, settling down in the valley grasses, the moon overhead and the village almost consumed in fog.

Her watch told her it was midnight, and that was when the fog took on a sinister character. She watched it swallow up the entire hill, reaching all the way down until it was nearly nipping at her feet. A rustle of wind howled through the trees, and when the fog started to lift she saw that the ruins were back in place, concealing the dying town once more. It had taken only moments, but her eyes hadn't deceived her.

For another year, Matsuo Village was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Shihori spent most of December looking for a women's clinic to help Mirei. Most required health care coverage and identity cards, but she found an older clinic about twenty miles away that specialized in helping women on the run from abusive partners. Of course Mirei's case was not like that, but the clinic didn't ask questions. Mirei received the care she needed, and Shihori insisted on paying. She didn't receive much from the Kisarazu Mystery Tales, but it was enough.

Having Mirei and Jun in the house was more helpful than Shihori realized. It meant other people to share the cooking and cleaning duties, late nights staying up talking and laughing, and someone to wish her well as she left for work at the store. Once the winter cleared up, Jun was able to find work as a hired hand at a chicken farm. It wasn't a glamorous job, but Shihori knew his pride had taken a hit during the winter when she had been responsible for supporting all three of them.

By the summer she was alone again. Jun and Mirei moved into a small cottage closer to the farm where Jun worked. The baby arrived in July, a healthy boy they named Taiyo. When Shihori held him in her arms at the hospital, she cried. 

She was twenty-three and soon to be a published novelist. After a year of monthly stories, Sho-san had finally taken the shinkansen way up north to tell her in person. Kisarazu had room on their schedule for a fall release, the compilation of Shihori's tales of "Mako" Village. She had only to add more details and a handful more stories, and it would see publication. 

Shihori took Sho-san around Hachimantai in her small car. He fell in love with her Grandma's house, with the woods surrounding it. She was bold enough to march him to the ruins, show him her "inspiration," although she withheld the truth about what was really going on. She didn't need to scare her editor away.

Sho-san shook her hand and smiled. "And if this sells well, you'll be able to write whatever you want."

Her hours were full. Between her job, sending off edits to Sho-san, her visits to the village, and to see Jun and Mirei and the baby, Shihori was busier than ever. She finally took time off at the insistence of Kisarazu Press, taking the train down to Tokyo for a book signing. She stayed with her parents, visited Maki, and had her small signing. It was in a small bookshop in average Arakawa, her hometown. But now Matsuo Village and Hachimantai felt more like home.

While Shihori had only expected a handful of people at the signing, there were more than 100. She signed each copy diligently, awed by the kind comments from the visitors. They wanted to know more about Mako Village. Wouldn't she consider writing another book set there? They told her which characters they liked. A few women her own age had come together, and they begged her to add more romance. She blushed at that, signing their books with a tentative "we'll see."

Maki saw her off at Tokyo Station, crowds hurrying around them as her cousin held her close. The letters between Maki and Nino had become so rapid that Shihori considered charging her cousin for the postage. But Maki was full of excitement to meet baby Taiyo and come up north in November.

"This year," Maki said, nearly shaking in happiness. "This year that stubborn fool may actually leave."

"What?" Shihori exclaimed. "Seriously?" Nothing in Nino's cheeky notes to Shihori had suggested that their relationship had grown that serious, but Maki was nodding.

"He says that he hadn't minded Tokyo when he was here before," she sighed and shook her head, grinning. "He says I don't make him enough cookies on account of being a busy student 350 miles away from him. He says that maybe if he just came here that he could have all the cookies he wanted."

"Sounds like a mutually beneficial arrangement," Shihori said with mock-solemnity, and Maki laughed.

"We'll see if he actually follows through."

She hugged her cousin again and hurried for her train. The Tokyo heat vanished behind her, and when she got back to the house she felt back in her element once more. She had new pictures of baby Taiyo waiting inside an envelope along with her mail that Jun had come over to bring in for her while she was gone. She smiled giddily at the photos, wanting to pinch the little one's cheeks.

She waltzed through the next few days at work, thinking happy thoughts for her cousin, wondering just what she could write for another Mako Village novel. Sho-san was emailing her sales figures almost hourly, even if the number didn't change, but the reception was warmer than she'd even imagined. Money was finally starting to flow her way, but it only meant she had to work harder to please her fans. Fans, she thought with a laugh. Hermit Kanjiya with her sewing machine, Hermit Kanjiya with her wheelbarrow and bags of rice, had fans.

When a co-worker called in sick one evening in September, she took on an extra shift at the grocery store. It was a slow night, and she was the only cashier on duty. She recognized a few of the customers who came in, making small talk. A few asked her if she was THE Kanjiya Shihori, the new author from Hachimantai. She said yes, but only after handing them their change and wishing for them to have a nice day.

It was nearly closing time when someone got in her queue with a six pack of beer and a pack of gum. She was already in automatic mode, scanning things through and announcing the price, before looking up to announce the final total.

She stared up into a pair of familiar brown eyes. His hair was longer than it had been so many years ago, a kind of shaggy look that flattered the shape of his sun-tanned face. He was tall, maybe a little taller than Jun, and she barely came up to his shoulder in her flat work shoes. She was stunned, tongue tied, and completely lost.

"Shihori-sama," Aiba Masaki said politely, inclining his head. He wiggled a 1000 yen bill in her face. "May I complete my transaction?"

\--

He waited outside for her, sitting on a bench and sipping one of his beers until her shift was over. It was after 9:00 PM when she emerged, finding him still there and still real. She pulled her car keys from her purse, inclining her head toward the store's parking lot.

"Do you need a ride somewhere?"

Which was a rather odd thing to say after almost eleven years, but there it was. There was none of the gangly teenage boy left. He still had his quirks - a longish nose, his scratchy voice - but she'd always liked those things. He was an adult now, despite the rather childish t-shirt, knee-length shorts, and flip flops he was wearing on his gigantic feet. Oddly enough she recognized the shirt, one that she'd donated to the village ages ago. It was maybe a size too small on him now, the fabric stretching across his chest, showing off his lean figure. He was slim but athletic, and he was a little less muscled than Jun.

"Ah, well I checked in at a motel."

"Shall I drive you there?"

He set his empty beer can back in his grocery bag, getting to his feet. The empty can rattled against the full ones. "You live here now, don't you? In Iwate?"

She nodded, unable (or unwilling) to look much further north than his chin. She'd waited so long for him, been disappointed so many times, that now he was here and she had no idea what to do. She didn't know if she was thrilled or angry or both. "I live in my Grandma's old house. She passed away, if you didn't hear."

"I heard. I'm very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you."

They were at another impasse. She could only think to extend her offer of a ride once more, maybe to get out her phone and call Jun to see if he wanted to put up his friend for the night. Surely they would be happy to see each other.

"I saw your book, and um, it had your photo and it said you were from Iwate," he started rambling. "And I thought that was odd because you're from Tokyo, of course. But yeah, I saw that and I guess I kind of packed everything up and got up here."

She finally did look up, seeing that old smile of his crossing his face. It was such a big smile, even under the streetlights outside the grocery store. "Just like that?"

"Just like that," he repeated with a nod. "I mean, I know somebody famous, right? Like the next Murakami Haruki or something."

"I wouldn't go that far..."

He shrugged. "I just...well, I saw your name first on the cover and then I saw your face on the back of it and wanted to see you. So here I am. Oh, and please don't be freaked out or anything, but I did kind of walk around town with the book asking where you lived for most of the day today. I'm surprised I didn't get arrested..."

She laughed at that. "Well you found me, Aiba-kun."

"I'm glad," he admitted.

Somehow he talked her into picking up his stuff from his motel and letting him sleep in a spare room of the house for the night. She reasoned that it would put him as close to Matsuo Village as he could get, even though there was a month and a half to go before he could see his mom, Nino, and the others.

On the car ride back from town, passing the usual farms on the winding road, Shihori helped fill in some of the gaps. Four years away was a long time. He was thrilled to hear about Jun and Mirei, vowing to see them first thing in the morning (although he laughed for a solid minute about Jun the chicken farm employee). He was equally thrilled to learn about Nino and Maki. He asked after his mom, thanking Shihori for visiting so diligently.

They made it to the house then, Aiba setting himself up almost too comfortably in one of her spare rooms, the one her parents used on their very rare visits north. He didn't have many belongings, just an old duffel bag and a backpack. His entire life in those two bags. She made tea, and they sat at the table, her new TV (finally!) broadcasting a music program.

The silence between them grew a little awkward, and when the channel went to a commercial break, they both tried to speak at the same time.

"You first," she said, staring down at her cup.

"No no, you go right ahead. Your house."

Sometimes the things Aiba-kun said didn't quite make sense. She took a sip of her tea before continuing. "I was just going to say that it's been eleven years since I've seen you. I feel like I'm at a bit of a disadvantage."

"Ah," he replied, grinning. "Yeah, it's only been four for me. You sure came a lot, that's what I always thought. What _we_ always thought. Your cousin, too, of course, but all the clothes and the books and the food...it was kind of amazing."

She found herself blushing. "Ah, it was the right thing to do, that's all."

"Oh no, it was amazing because I was impressed you had enough strength to push that wheelbarrow up the hill all the time." He leaned forward with a wicked look in his eyes. "Since you're still such a pipsqueak."

She fumed, wanting to boot him from the house and see how long it took him to walk to Jun's. "You...you...jerk!"

He put his hand over his heart. "A low blow! Jerk! Jerk, she says."

She continued to rage internally, feeling all of nine years old again instead of twenty-three, enduring his teasing. He hadn't matured a bit, had he? Ah, of course he hadn't. "Aiba-kun, you are a guest in this house. Maybe you should treat your hostess with respect, seeing as you are currently a freeloader."

He snorted, running a hand through his messy hair. "I was being perfectly respectful. I was praising your ability to push, given your size limitations."

She crossed her arms. "You know, I am a very sturdy 156 centimeters, thank you. It is a respectable height."

Finally he held up his hands. "Truce! Truce then!" He leaned forward, resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his palm. "I missed fighting with you, Shihori-chan. It's been one-sided for so long!"

He was pulling her every which way. Showing up out of the blue, settling himself back in her home and admittedly in her heart. Mentioning how he'd always been able to see her, somehow, in Matsuo Village and how she'd spent so many years oblivious, showing up in town all sweaty and nasty and dropping things off not realizing everyone could see her. It was mortifying, knowing Aiba had probably followed her all over Matsuo, if Nino was to be believed. The whole village and Aiba himself had seen her go through her teenage years, her every awkward stage growing up.

"Well it's good that you're back then," she told him. "Because I'm more than willing to make up for lost time. Keep calling me short, and I'll...I'll do something about it."

His eyes were almost sparkling, like some dippy shoujo manga hero. From gangly boy to handsome pest, Aiba certainly had character. How on earth had she spent her teenage years mooning over him like some romantic ideal? He was so frustrating, even in the few hours they'd been reconnecting. And yet if she kicked him out she'd be inconsolable. After all that waiting to see him again, maybe she could put up with the wisecracks.

They made it through the rest of the music program without any teasing, and when she yawned, he reached for the remote control. "Are you working tomorrow?" he asked.

She nodded. "10 to 7," she said, getting to her feet. "Which means I should give you directions to Jun-kun's place so you can entertain yourself during the day."

She moved to the small set of drawers in the cabinet under the TV, fishing around for some paper and a pen. He was definitely not allowed to borrow her car, but she found the key for the storage shed and the bikes inside. Wishing him a good night, she turned to head for bed.

"Shihori-chan..."

She turned, stifling another yawn. "There's extra towels in the hall closet by the bathroom. And there's eggs in the refrigerator if you want to make yourself breakfast."

He cocked his head, looking at her slyly. "Just so things are clear...do you have a boyfriend or anything?"

"What?" she screeched, happy for the complete isolation of her house from the rest of town.

"I'm only asking as a courtesy. Like if I get back from Jun's and there's some guy sitting here I won't be surprised or anything."

She put her hands at her hips, staring daggers at him. "I live here by myself. Good night."

"So you _don't_ have a boyfriend?" he asked, that teasing tone still in his voice.

Without offering a response, since it had to be totally obvious she was single, she turned around and headed for her room, sliding the door shut firmly. 

\--

He slept late, and despite how well he'd been arranged in the guest room, somehow he'd sprawled out on the floor of the living room without turning off the TV. Wherever he'd traveled from, he'd been exhausted His limbs were every which way across the tatami, and despite the urge to let him deal with being silly enough to fall asleep on the floor, she pulled a blanket out and draped it over him before making herself breakfast and getting ready for work. His face was completely calm and peaceful in sleep, and she caught herself staring, forcing herself to look away. So much of his life was still a mystery to her.

The isolated nature of the house meant she left the doors unlocked, so when he woke he wouldn't have to worry about needing a key to get back in. He'd been rather unclear about his current status. Did he work somewhere? Was he just up for a visit? Was he intending to stay here in the house with her indefinitely? She'd loved Mirei and Jun's company, but that was way different. She hadn't had crushes on Mirei or Jun for more than half her life.

Work crawled along in slow-motion, and during her breaks she texted with Mirei. Apparently Aiba had dropped in completely unannounced, even though he had a cell phone and Jun's number on the piece of paper she'd left behind for him. He was currently "head over heels" for baby Taiyo, and Mirei was happy for the break. Happy to know that Aiba was accounted for, Shihori made it through the rest of her shift.

By 7:00 the sun was coming down and she drove back to the house fully expecting Aiba to have come and claimed his bags so he could stay with his friends. Instead she found him in her kitchen making some odd-smelling fried rice in the ancient wok she'd inherited from Grandma.

She wrinkled her nose at Chef Aiba's cuisine. "What the heck is in that?"

"Some mabo tofu," he announced proudly. He'd even helped himself to her apron, though it barely tied in the back and came to mid-thigh on him. Under it he was wearing one of the t-shirts she'd brought to Matsuo Village years back, recognizing the small orange stain on the shoulder that had brought the price down to 25 yen at the secondhand store. How often did he wear it? Did he think of her when he did?

She watched him cook with a skeptical eye. "What on earth have you been feeding yourself all this time you've been away?"

"Everything I couldn't have as a kid. And a lot of fried chicken." He patted the barely there belly he had with an appreciative smile. She envied his metabolism, if that was all four years of fried chicken had done to his body.

Despite the odd dinner, he seemed pleased to be the one doing the work, insisting on doing the dishes as well. It was the oddest fried rice she'd ever had, but certainly not the worst. He was in good spirits, spending most of the meal with his mouth open, gabbing about his day with Mirei and the baby and then at the end, Jun himself. "He smacked me in the head," Aiba bragged. "Said I wasn't allowed to stay away like that again."

She sat and listened as he detailed his years away. The first time he had gone out had been with Nino and Jun, back when they were eighteen. They'd taken odd jobs all over the country, mostly farm work in isolated towns, sometimes handing out flyers or tissues in downtown areas. Nino hadn't liked the constant moving, and Jun, in spite of his relatively poor childhood, grew tired of sharing tiny one-room apartments and surviving on snacks from the convenience store.

But Aiba had loved it, meeting new people, seeing new places. Pulling out a map and pointing anywhere and making it happen. As he talked, his gaze fixed on the wall, she learned more about him than she had in their previous meetings, more about him than she'd imagined for the sake of her teenage fantasies. 

He'd spent the last four years on the road, walking as far as he could until his shoes fell apart. While Shihori had shut herself up, sewing buttons and writing, Aiba had seen the world (or at the very least the Japan part of it). He'd slept under bridges and in roach-infested hotels and in bamboo forests. He'd climbed mountains and swam in the ocean and saved up for a month to sit behind home plate at the Tokyo Dome for a baseball game.

There'd been girls along the way, too, if the way he said female names and trailed off from time to time meant anything. She pushed down the twinges of jealousy, annoyed with herself for the unreasonable feelings. He spoke about the things he'd done and seen until his voice started to crack and the clock on the wall read 2:00 in the morning. She hadn't spoken in hours aside from a few questions here and there.

"But you came back," she said. "It's not November. You can't go home yet. Why go to the trouble now?"

He shrugged. "I was in Hiroshima," he said. "And then I saw your face on a small poster in a bookstore."

She chuckled. "That's a pretty flimsy excuse to travel across the country."

But then he looked at her so intensely, almost as seriously as he had when he was detailing his exciting life, that she had to swallow hard. "I don't think it's flimsy," he said quietly.

She finally had to look down, rubbing her eyes. He'd kept her up so late that tomorrow morning would be unbearable. "This weekend," she said. "Can you show me around the village? Can you show me how you saw it from the other side?"

He nodded with a grin. "Of course I can. Besides, my mom will be happy to see me even if she can't smack me like Jun could."

That settled, Shihori got up and headed for bed, hearing Aiba trudging behind her and wishing her a good night as he went into the room he was using. She lingered in the bathroom, brushing her teeth and staring at herself in the mirror.

Aiba hadn't so much as mentioned staying with Jun and Mirei. It was as though they'd come to a tacit agreement that Aiba would be staying with her indefinitely. And she was glad for it.

\--

He made more of his strange recipes, insisting she try everything until one evening she came home from work with a whole basket of chicken for him from the fast food place in town. He spent a mere minute bitching about having slaved away in the kitchen for her before turning off the stove's burner and yanking the bag from her hands with a boyish and gleeful laugh.

She couldn't help watching the way he ate, as though every bite might be his last. For as obnoxious and teasing as he could be, her observations of Aiba Masaki, adult, in the past few days had revealed a rather gentle, kind person despite that. He said thank you for everything, from a lift in the car to Jun's place to a fresh beer from the fridge. He respected her privacy in the house and repaired the leaky faucet in the bathroom without being asked.

They spent their evenings watching TV, catching up on lost time. She jotted things down on her notepad, ideas for her next Mako Village novel. Her life story for the past several years wasn't as interesting as his, but he listened dutifully as she talked about the quirky folks who used to come into the fabric store back in Tokyo as well as her struggles to be published, the feelings of happiness she'd had upon bringing her own book up to the cashier at the store to be purchased.

He watched her sometimes, mostly when she wasn't looking. When she'd be scribbling things down at commercial breaks, she could feel his eyes drifting from the screen to where she sat on the other side of the low table. She tried not to notice, if only because she did the same when his attention was on the TV shows. In a matter of days she'd grown used to the sight of him in her living room, long legs stretched out while he hugged one of her cushions to his chest, laughing noisily with the comedians on TV.

He wasn't flawless. He squinted while he watched TV, a telltale sign of years in Matsuo Village without a visit to an eye doctor once. His skin looked a little rough, weather-beaten and a little bumpy from some acne scarring. He had a single piercing in his left ear, not on the lobe but in the cartilage in the middle. A dare from Nino when they'd been out on the road. He sometimes walked around after his baths in a tank top, showcasing a colorful birthmark that dominated the skin of his shoulder.

He wasn't flawless, and she liked it. The curve of his mouth, the angle of his jaw, the smile that changed his whole face. He wasn't the Aiba-kun she'd made up in her head, the Aiba-kun she'd imagined as a teenager hauling books into the village. The big broad-shouldered guy who was manly and tough. He was simply the person before her, smiling and friendly. Narrow at the waist with knobby knees.

The weekend came, and it was finally time to go to the village. He made little complaining noises about her preferred route to the valley from the house, claiming to know the "best" way, but she ignored him, pushing along her wheelbarrow full of some new fall clothes. Thicker socks and long-sleeved button-down shirts. He paused when they made it to the edge of the trees, and he looked out across the valley to see the hilltop shrouded with fog, the abandoned buildings drifting in and out of sight as the mist floated about.

"I don't really like to see it from this side," he admitted. "It doesn't look like my Matsuo."

He didn't say anything else, his sudden touch almost burning when he lifted her hands from the wheelbarrow handles and started to push it himself, down the hill and into the valley. She followed after him. His spirits had revived a bit when they made it to the road, and he focused on pushing.

"Mom!" he called out into the empty streets, his voice echoing off the broken concrete slabs. "Hey Mom!"

She looked around, seeing only the Matsuo she mostly knew. The ruined hulk of a town, the green that year by year swallowed up more of what humans had built, reclaiming it. But she was utterly convinced that at the same time, Eiko-san was rushing out of her apartment at the sound of her son's voice. Shihori could just imagine her hurrying down the steps, racing into the center of town with Nino at her heels.

She could imagine the others gathered, the dwindling numbers. In Maki's last letter, she had hinted that Nino might not be the only one to leave this coming November. That the younger members of the village were restless, eager to follow in Jun and Aiba's footsteps. That the older residents would need care, someone to help them as they aged.

She said none of this to Aiba, who stood still, shutting his eyes and throwing his arms out. He let out an odd little shout, not angry or sad, but just noise. Loud noise declaring that he was here and real, that the Matsuo he really wanted was hidden away beyond his control. But she wanted to believe they were there. Eiko-san reaching out a hand to touch her son's face, even if he couldn't feel it. Nino moving to wrap an arm around his shoulder. 

There'd always been such a sense of isolation when she was younger, in the years when she hadn't known they were really here somehow and keeping an eye on her. It seemed different now as Aiba stood there with his arms out, almost as though he was begging the universe to lift whatever curse had been put on this place so he could be part of his Matsuo again.

He seemed unashamed to cry, and she could see from the way he was chuckling a bit that it was more of a happy cry than an anguished one. Maybe he could sense them better than she could. Maybe he could hear them speaking.

She felt like she was intruding, so she moved back. He barely noticed as she pushed the wheelbarrow again, bringing it to her traditional Block 3. Waiting for her was a letter to Maki from Nino and letters, too, for Mirei and Jun. Once she had done her usual rounds, she pushed the wheelbarrow back, bringing it to the edge of town near the road for whenever they set off. 

Aiba had barely moved, so she gave him privacy, ducking around one of the buildings. It was one of her favorite lookout places, always had been. The view was not of the woods she'd come from but the woods beyond, the opposite way from Grandma's house. She'd never gone further than Matsuo, contenting herself with the distant mountains, the lush green hills.

It was at least an hour before he returned to her. She heard the sound of his worn sneakers on the rubble behind her as he carefully stepped his way around. She didn't turn around for fear of seeing his face, his all too open feelings expressed there. Instead she crossed her arms and stood her ground, listening to him approach. But where she expected him to say something silly or complain that she'd distributed the wheelbarrow's gifts without him, she felt him come up behind her and stop.

The hair on her arms stood on end. He was hardly a foot away, behind her so close she could hear him breathing. Things had changed during the odd week they'd been in one another's company. She'd grown close so quickly, adjusting to the rightness of his presence in the rooms of her house, the sound of his voice welcoming her home.

"I talked to you every time," he said, and his voice was soft and affectionate. "You never heard me. You never once heard me. I used to scream at you, begging for your attention. You gave up everything to help Matsuo Village, even moved here for us. And all those years, all those years you came here without wanting anything in return. And I couldn't even say thank you..."

She wanted to correct his assumptions, that in coming to Iwate she "gave up everything" - that was impossible. Matsuo was everything, and she'd have it no other way. Instead she shook her head uneasily. "Aiba-kun, everyone has thanked me more than enough. It's quite alright and I'm perfectly..."

She froze when his arms came around her shoulders, pulling her back against him. He was solid and warm, his head resting against the side of her own. "Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you," he murmured. 

Shihori couldn't bear the thought of turning around, seeing whatever look was in his eyes. This wasn't the place. He was doing this, embracing her, here in the ruined town, the hopeless fogged up town. She wished them anywhere else for such a private moment, anywhere out of the sight of everyone else. Anywhere but this dead place. Was Eiko-san watching? Was Nino? She shut her eyes, content to lose herself in the feeling of his arms around her. Maybe after all this time she hadn't been the only one wishing for this. They teased each other and fought like cats and dogs, but maybe that was just who they were.

It seemed like a long time before he released her, feeling almost cold with his absence. He cleared his throat, mumbling something about telling his mom some things for a while. She left him to it, pushing the wheelbarrow back in her usual way by herself. She left him to Matsuo and the sound of his own voice carrying off into the wind, into the ears of people neither of them could see or feel.

She locked the wheelbarrow up in the shed, moved into the house, feeling a giddy sort of excitement building and building within her. He wasn't just here to be friends. He hadn't seen her face in a Hiroshima shop window and dropped everything on a whim or because he was bored. He'd seen her face and dropped everything because he cared about her. It wasn't a daydream, helping her through a high school exam. It wasn't an overbearing gesture of love, the words "I love you, Shihori" raining down on her from a Matsuo Village rooftop. His feelings were in the way he watched her from the corner of his eye, from the way he'd dropped back into her life and made no hints of leaving. From the years and years he'd watched her come to his town without ever giving up.

When he returned it was after dark, and things were quiet. A turning point had arisen, and neither of them seemed on solid footing. He'd fired the first shot, holding her in his arms, but who would fire the second? Who would take it beyond that? Who would confirm a future?

On that night, it was neither of them. Aiba fried up dinner, and she jotted things down for her novel. The promised romance her fans seemed eager to read, there in her lazy scrawled handwriting in its early stages. When they turned off the TV and said good night, she went to her room and he went to his.

\--

In full-blown panic she raced to the library during her work breaks the following day. It was too much to type on a phone. Her fingers flew over the borrowed computer keys, begging her cousin for some sort of insight. Love had come easily to Maki. A boy and a bike, secret letters, the promise that November held - of Nino putting Matsuo behind him and going to her. "You're more than useful, you're necessary," Nino had once told Shihori. In Nino's life as it was now, Maki was a whole other kind of necessary.

But with Aiba-kun it was different, the way he teased and joked. How open he seemed to be with every emotion, but after he'd hugged her he'd retreated.

"You're totally old-fashioned," came her cousin's typically too honest reply. "I went after Nino myself. Sometimes guys like to be pursued. Why don't you just tell him how you feel?"

Impossible, Shihori thought. Totally impossible. Maki threatened to take the train north and smack some sense into her. She threatened to come north and tell Aiba herself that Shihori had been in love with him for years, and he hadn't even needed to be physically present for it. Her feelings were just that strong.

Every part of that frightened Shihori even further, and she typed angrily back to Maki that she was "the world's worst love coach" and threatened in return to withhold Nino's letters, or worse, to read them out loud to Aiba.

Maki's only reply to that was "I love you, Shii-chan. Good luck!"

Not the sort of person to go for Maki's direct attack strategy, she found herself turning to Mirei after work in hopes of a better solution. Jun and Aiba had gone off for a hike overnight near Mount Iwate, and the two women sat in the tiny cottage sipping tea.

"What do I do?" she asked quietly, trying not to wake the baby, who'd finally started to sleep through the night. "He's been here a week. Only a week. Things don't happen that quickly. I'm trying to be reasonable. I keep telling myself that I saw him for two days, only two days and this week. I've had, like, nine days of him in my entire life."

Mirei smiled. "But they've been important days, right?"

She shrugged. "Well, yes, I suppose."

"Shii, I think you already know how you feel about him. And having him in your house for an entire week without killing him is a major accomplishment. I grew up with him, believe me. He's so silly sometimes. Impulsive and strange and so loud."

She snorted a bit ungracefully. "His volume has only gotten louder as he's gotten older."

Mirei patted her hand. "He's crazy about you. It's probably cheating, telling you this, but I know he cares about you. It got so boring in the village sometimes. And it was hard for him especially. I mean, Nino always had those letters, Jun and I...well...basically what I'm saying is that you kept him sane. To the extent that a person like Aiba-kun could be sane. And when you weren't there he wondered what you were up to. Isn't that the same thing you did on your end? Writing to Maki? Writing about us?"

"Maki thinks I should just tell him straight out," she muttered. "That's not me at all."

Her friend grinned. "But that's not true. Even when you used to drop things off in the village you'd always be grumbling that Aiba-kun should read every book cover to cover, or that you didn't know his size so you brought shirts in at least four different sizes for him to try on so he couldn't complain. You've never had trouble telling him things like that."

She blushed. "Well that was different. I never knew he was actually there. It was...therapeutic or something, talking out what I was bringing to the village. It's so quiet in Matsuo when you're visiting, and you know that now. And besides, telling Aiba-kun to read is not the same as telling Aiba-kun I love him."

"Well, you just said it to me without hesitating. That's something!"

Shihori paused, holding up her hand. "Just a moment. Mirei-chan, you may in fact be a genius."

"Be a friend and tell Jun that when he makes fun of me for making my extra special bunny face at the baby..."

She looked up, beaming, knowing just what she had to do. It wasn't a Maki-style confession, but it was a suitable one for Shihori. Reading. Reading was the key! "I told him to read. I brought books and told him to read them."

"Right..."

"So I'll tell him in a book! And if he really does care about me he'll see it and read it and know how I feel." After all, it had been a poster promoting her book that had made him drop everything and head north.

"A novel? But that'll take forever for you to write..."

Shihori chuckled. "I've got something else in mind."

\--

When she got home, she apologized humbly to Aiba's door before sliding it open and turning on the light. She didn't like snooping, but it wasn't like she was up to no good. He kept the room rather tidy, she was happy to discover. He'd left his larger bag and taken his backpack along for his hike with Jun. He'd taken over an old dresser in the corner of the room, left some handfuls of loose change on top of it along with a deodorant stick and a flyer from the chicken place in town.

She smiled at the sight of his futon on the floor, her novel casually tossed near the pillow. She settled herself on the floor and reached for the book. It was the same as any other copy, the cover with the foggy hillside that she and Sho-san had worked diligently to describe to the production staff. The small blurb and photo of herself on the back, a simple black and white portrait of her looking to the left and caught mid-laugh. It had been Sho-san, telling jokes during the shoot.

Aiba's ticket stub for the Giants game at the Tokyo Dome served as his bookmark, and he was almost finished reading it. She'd brought a pen with her, opening the book up and staring at the inside cover page for an agonizing few seconds. It was now or never.

The people at Kisarazu Press had kept the line moving at her book signing. It was an efficient process - hello, what's your name? Is that so? You liked it? Thank you very much. Sign. Next person please? But now she didn't have staff whisking people through the queue. She didn't even know if Aiba liked the book, though he was diligently reading it. 

She found herself writing "Aiba-san" and then panicked. Aiba-san? She was beginning a love confession so formally? She groaned as the ink soaked into the page. Scribbling it out would just make her look like a crazy person, defacing the book. So she decided to just keep going.

"Aiba-san," she wrote. "Thank you for always looking after me in your own way. If you have found this message, I hope you will forgive me for expressing my feelings in this space. The truth of the matter is this - I love you."

She signed her name and shut the book hurriedly, flinging it back onto the mattress. "Stupid," she murmured. "Oh you stupid woman." She definitely couldn't take it back now. It was out there, etched into his book as permanently as the typeface on the other pages.

But a weight had lifted. The same as when she'd first committed Matsuo to paper, the things nobody believed transformed into a charming story, easily packaged and sold. Her writing wasn't fiction, not really, but it didn't much matter. Her feelings, scribbled on the inside cover of Aiba's book, weren't fiction either. They were out of her, from their uncertain home in her heart and onto paper. 

She shook her head, setting the book back where Aiba had left it. She could almost imagine Maki standing in the doorway, laughing at her rather cowardly confession. What if Aiba never found it? What if they lived out the time until November as awkward friends and he went back to Matsuo and out of her life again?

Well, that was the chance she had to take.


	5. Chapter 5

Aiba returned from the hike refreshed and cheerful as usual, boasting some mushrooms he and Jun had picked along the way. She spent the whole first night he was back on pins and needles, wondering if she should steal into his room and throw the book out the window before he discovered it. It was different having him here, the scent of him as he moved from room to room, the sound of his humming while he cooked dinner.

He luckily didn't seem to notice how strange she was acting since he was fully absorbed in the comedians on TV. He'd never had television in Matsuo, and when he'd been on the road, moving constantly, he'd never had much reason to have one. So now that he could relax every night and laugh, he was growing obsessed. 

They washed the dishes, Shihori at the sink and Aiba by her side on drying duty. Their hands brushed occasionally when she passed him a plate, and it was driving her crazy. She was almost grateful for bedtime and the promise of a day at work in the morning, where she could focus on customers and scanning bar codes and things that weren't a love confession hanging in the air, waiting for a reply.

When morning came, breakfast was ready and Aiba was sitting at the table already eating. She froze up at the sight of her book on the table beside his plate, but she thanked him for the meal, sitting down and eating slowly. He didn't touch the book at all, and their breakfast passed with idle conversation. 

Aiba would be job hunting, which implied to Shihori that perhaps he didn't intend to go back to the village in November. That was promising, but it didn't answer the question she most wanted an answer to. She gave him a few suggestions for where he might be hired around town, offered to read over his applications. He thanked her with a smile and moved to clean up.

She'd grabbed her purse and was just pulling out her keys to head out the door when she heard him call her name. He was at the table, her book in his hands.

"I'm determined to finish this today once I go through the job ads," he said, wiggling it a bit. "So I can give you my full opinion. I'm not a writing critic or anything, but I do have some comments."

"Good comments or bad comments?" she asked, eyes lingering on the book and the confession inside it.

He smirked, shaking his head. "You'll just have to wait and see."

The torture she'd given herself continued. Her book with the foggy cover remained on the living room table, slowly surrounded by job applications as September turned to October. His bookmark hadn't moved. She came home from work to find him watching TV instead or pulling weeds in the yard with a towel wrapped around his head and a sheen of sweat on his face. He even did the impossible, diligently cleaning the pond that Grandpa had always ignored. She knew from Mirei that he went over to see the baby almost every day. She knew from the mud on some of his shoes in the genkan that he'd been back and forth to Matsuo. And she knew from the unmoving bookmark that she had yet to be found out.

Aiba was also the recipient of letters from Nino and his mother now. Maki had apparently let them all know that Aiba was not just back in the area but staying with Shihori. She worried herself almost sick that Maki had let the cat out of the bag and that Aiba was just not saying anything. She didn't pry when she heard Aiba in his room reading what Nino had written to him and laughing. She simply had to be more patient.

He got a job at his now beloved fast food chicken place, even after she'd helped him through dozens of applications for other things. He came home smelling like the fryer, stinking up her house with it. He was never happier, telling her about some of the odder customers, bragging about his employee discount. She told him he would probably turn into a chicken wing, and he only laughed at her.

It was the first night in November when Aiba turned the TV off and picked the book up from the center of the table, nodding firmly. "I promised you I would finish this. It's rude of me not to," he said.

She was busy jotting notes down, fleshing out the outline for her novel. Soon she'd be ready to get writing in earnest. "Oh?" she murmured, trying not to turn pink as he slid out his bookmark, stretching out on the floor with the book.

The room was quiet save for the sound of her pen scratching the paper and the sound of him turning pages. Her writing came to a screeching halt an hour later when he closed the book and set it down on the floor, hearing him let out a sound of happiness.

"Ahhhh, Shihori-chan, it was so good!" he cried, and she watched him roll onto his back, arms stretched out to either side of him on the tatami. "You're a good writer!"

"Thanks..."

"No, seriously," he addressed the ceiling beams. "It's like you really get Matsuo. Of course you're totally wrong about some stuff but I figure that's for, you know, the sake of the book. But it's like, I could tell that Ren-chan was supposed to be like Mirei and that Tsubasa-kun was Jun-kun."

"Was it so obvious?"

Aiba chuckled. "Tsubasa-kun's eyebrows, I mean, come on. Who else could it be?" He picked up the book again, started thumbing through it. "Ah, I want to read it again. Maybe I was in here and I didn't realize it. Or maybe I was supposed to be Takumi, although he wasn't really a major character so that's kind of disappointing..."

She watched, heart racing as he flipped the pages back and forth, yammering away about this character or that. "I'm going to bed," she announced suddenly.

He looked over at her, frowning. "Do you not take criticism well? I'm trying to be fair here."

She got to her feet, closing her notepad and slipping it back on the dresser near the TV where she had a growing stack of them. "I can take criticism just fine, thanks. But I'm tired, that's all, Aiba-kun."

"Oh, well I'm sorry for keeping you up," he said, reddening a bit. "Have a good night."

\--

She was standing in front of the vanity table in her room, staring at herself in the mirror. How childishly she was behaving. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection so long as she was already in that mindset. He'd been offering feedback for her work the same as Jun and Mirei had when they'd read it, the same as her other fans. But it had been the shuffling of the pages, the way he was so casually stretched out across her floor, that had driven her away.

She pulled her hair out of its usual bun, reaching for her hairbrush. "You're being silly," she told herself as she tried to calm herself with gentle brushstrokes. In two weeks Matsuo Village would return. Maki would be up for her visit, Nino would have his decision to make, everyone would come to the house for the annual party. She needed to focus on things like that, on her responsibilities.

Shihori jumped when there was a tap on the door. She turned, backing herself against the dresser, hairbrush clutched in her hand. "Yes?"

"Can I come in? Are you decent?"

She rolled her eyes. If he could stand the sight of the mismatched tank top and pajama bottoms she wore to bed, then she was perfectly decent. "You can come in."

He slid the door open tentatively, his head poking inside. "I just had a question for you. Sorry to interrupt your lady getting ready for bed stuff."

What was it now? Was there one last gripe about Takumi's relative lack of involvement in the story? "You're only interrupting the important lady task of hair brushing and delaying the other lady task of face cream. I think I'll manage."

He nodded, padding on in. He mostly kept out of her room, especially now that he had the perpetual scent of fried chicken lingering on his clothes. He usually only knocked on the door in the morning to wake her for breakfast. She could sense that he was nervous from the way he slowly moved towards her. It was then that she noticed the book in his hand, and she went numb.

"Just one question, really, and I'll let you get back to those things," he said before lifting the book and opening it to the inside cover, finger tapping on her handwriting. "So um, do you sign every book this way?"

"I don't."

The air in the room seemed heavier with her answer, and she watched him nod a few times before he looked up from the book in his hands to meet her eyes. She saw nothing of the obnoxious boy who'd run into her so many years ago, telling her to watch where she was going. She was happy to find the smile of someone who was a man grown, a shy smile he couldn't tamp down. A look in his eyes she'd never forget.

"I lied," he whispered. And just like that, the obnoxious boy was back. "I have another question."

She waved her arm weakly, gesturing with her hairbrush. "Ask away." She was surprised by the strength in her voice, given how ready she was to melt into a puddle on the floor of her bedroom.

"How long ago did you write this in here?"

She cocked her head, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. "Oh, well...a month ago I'd say."

"A month ago, you'd say."

She nodded.

"I see."

She nodded once more. And then her jaw dropped when he simply grinned again and said "okay, good to know!" and turned on his heel, walking out of her bedroom.

"Hey!" she shouted, flinging her hairbrush across the room in her shock. She stomped out of the bedroom angrily, catching him in full retreat as she chased him down the hall toward the living room. He stood there with his hands on his hips, his back to her. "Hey, you come back here, you jerk! Those are my feelings you're walking all over right now, and you know what, they're true! So you can accept them happily or say thank you, but I can't return them. That's how normal people respond. They don't just snicker like a kid and run off so why don't you just..."

He turned just before she could punch him in the shoulder, wrapping her up in the best, warmest hug she'd ever received in her life. He still smelled like chicken, but she didn't much mind, feeling one of his arms settle around her back as his other hand came up to stroke her hair. 

"You're in love with a jerk," he chided her, his head resting atop her own. "What will you tell your parents?"

"That I'm an adult, and I'll love who I like."

"Well, I'm glad," he said, squeezing her tight. "Because I've been in love with you for most of my life."

She supposed that shaking uncontrollably with laughter wasn't the route a normal romantic heroine would take. It wasn't something she planned to write in her second Mako Village novel, that when the hero confessed his love the heroine had a giggling fit. But then again, when Aiba started laughing too, she knew that they'd never be the type of couple who'd appear in any novel.

"Say it again," she said, wrapping her arms around him, head pressed against his chest. She'd waited so long for this. "Just so I know you're not teasing me."

"I wouldn't tease about something like this," he protested. "There's so many other wonderful things I could tease you about anyway."

"You still haven't said it again!"

"I could tease you about the cute way you crinkle your nose when I come back from work. You'd think I smelled like animal poop or something."

"Aiba-kun...just say it again and I won't scream."

"Or the way you call Maki-chan in a panic every time you screw something up when you're cooking instead of just trusting yourself...I've only been here a month and I've already lost track of how many times."

"Hey now..."

"And there's the old standby, the fact that you are vertically challenged and probably have to buy your clothes in the kids' section of the store..."

She shoved him away with a growl. "You're hopeless!"

He pointed at her. "You're beautiful!"

"You're obnoxious!"

"You're perfect!" He bit his lip to keep from cracking up, staring at her like he'd clearly won.

Her hands were fists at her sides now, shaking. "You smell like a deep fryer!"

He leaned forward, hands sliding down her arms to unball her hands and take them in his own. "Shihori-sama," he said, "I love you."

She looked up at him, squeezing his hands. "There, was that so hard?"

Shihori closed her eyes when he bent down, kissing her for the first time. Don't go into the forest, Grandpa had warned her so many years ago. You'll only regret it in the end. 

But there were no regrets, not a single one, as she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him back.

\--

Maki actually screamed the next day when Shihori called her during a break from work.

Shihori had woken that morning in her futon, completely exhausted and in need of several hours' more sleep. She didn't know how long they'd stood there in the middle of the living room, simply learning how wonderful it was to kiss one another, to feel his mouth on hers. Eventually her neck had grown a bit sore from having to lean up, and he'd sent her off to bed with a whisper in her ear telling her again how much he loved her despite his "many deficiencies" in her eyes.

It was kind of sickening to say it all out loud, even to Maki who had never minded when Shihori gushed about boys. She'd even told Maki about the rather odd ways their confessions had come out the night before, her cousin laughing at her and Aiba's mutual pigheadedness.

"A perfect match," Maki decided. "Nino always said the two of you together would be exhausting to watch."

"And how long has Nino been gossiping with you about this?"

"If I told you, I believe I would be uninvited from the festivities in a few weeks."

Shihori sighed. "That long huh?"

She headed back to finish up her shift, watching the clock slowly tick forward. Finally it was time to go, and she was both surprised and pleased to find Aiba waiting outside for her. He didn't seem to care that other people were coming in and out of the store, running up and kissing her soundly in the store's parking lot. She finally had to push him away, blushing at the little cheers coming from two of her co-workers, waving goodbye.

When she pulled out her car keys, he shook his head, gesturing to the bike he'd ridden. "Handlebars?" he asked, "or will the lady be sitting?"

It was an entirely different feeling this time, sitting on the bike's seat and holding on to him while he pedaled them all the way home. Because this time he wasn't the boy who'd go back to the village and disappear. He was the person who was going to stay.

Tonight she doubted he would let her sleep alone. He was rarely away from her side, holding her in his arms and kissing her by the shed after they locked up the bike. They nearly burned dinner in the oven because he discovered how much he liked the sight of her perched on the kitchen counter, her arms around his shoulders, smacking him away every time he tried to sneak his hand inside her blouse. They watched TV together, and he lay with his head in her lap, legs stretched out while she smiled and stroked his hair. She could get used to this.

Shihori was actually the one to hold her hand out later that evening, tugging him along behind her. Thankfully he'd had his bath and was in a soft cotton t-shirt that smelled like laundry soap. They closed her bedroom door and took it slow.

When she woke she didn't want to move, her scent and his tied together under her blankets. He'd wrapped an arm around her in his sleep, his hand clutched around her middle. She could get used to this, too.

\--

They walked to Matsuo Village hand-in-hand, Maki ahead of them holding her head high, prepared to drag Nino kicking and screaming if she had to. She after all was generously preparing to house an unemployed person with no identity papers in her tiny Tokyo apartment, paid for by her dwindling university scholarship money and her part-time job. She'd even told her parents about him, save for the freeloading stranger from a cursed, invisible town bit. Nino had no choice but to follow through on his promises, though Shihori doubted he was anything but loyal.

Aiba tugged her along, choosing not to let her go as they ran from the edge of the forest and into the valley, teasing her about her short legs holding him back from reaching his full speed. He only released her upon catching sight of his mother, nearly knocking the woman over in his eagerness to embrace her. They told everyone that Jun and Mirei were back at the house with the baby, which set off a round of cheers.

Maki and Nino decided to take a different way back to the house once they reunited, which made some of the older Matsuo villagers laugh. Eiko-san walked between her son and Shihori, arms around both of their waists. Aiba informed Eiko-san that he and Shihori were now together, and Eiko-san laughed. "You two have been together a lot longer than you think," she insisted.

Baby Taiyo was the star attraction of the day, the poor little one screaming his head off as he was passed from person to unfamiliar person until Mirei finally intervened and took him away for a feeding. "Luckily he didn't inherit your eyebrows," Nino informed baby Taiyo's father, earning himself a light kick in the backside.

For once Shihori was forbidden from her hostess role, Maki and Jun ruling the kitchen and distributing the food. Instead Aiba, with her hand in his, sat with the residents and filled them in on his four years of adventuring and his unfortunate (for Shihori) calling in the fried chicken business. Maybe if he got some fake papers, he was saying, he could take over a franchise someday. Eiko-san met Shihori's panicked glance with a roll of her eyes. Her son, the impulsive dreamer.

The time finally came. Nino officially had something to say. Everyone sat quietly while he got to his feet, holding up his glass to Maki. Only baby Taiyo made a sound, gurgling onto the towel on his Papa's shoulder.

"I'm moving to Tokyo," he announced before making everyone gasp as he got down on one knee. "Where I hope to have the honor of marrying Horikita Maki-san."

The room was alert, everyone looking between the couple, wondering what Maki's answer would be. Even Aiba was squeezing Shihori's hand tight, nervous for his friend. Shihori seemed to be the only one in on the joke though, looking between her cousin and Nino, seeing the wicked looks in their eyes.

Maki grinned. "Get a job first."

Nino staggered back, hand clutching his chest before giving up the act. "Ah, yeah I suppose that's a good idea. Never mind, folks. Wedding's off."

Jun groaned, and Mirei gave Nino a smack. Unlike in most years, the party didn't end by mid-afternoon. In fact, Eiko-san had an announcement of her own on behalf of the village. The curse had taken its toll for too long, and the time had come to finally put Matsuo behind them. For the sake of the younger residents who had so much potential, and for the sake of the older residents who needed better medical care and comfort as they aged.

Apparently Eiko-san had reached out through Nino's letters and through Maki's assistance over the past year. People who'd left the village had been found. Not all, but many. People like Nino's parents, who had left years earlier, leaving their son in Eiko-san's care. Aiba's aunt and uncle. Officer Katori's wife. Some of them were doing well, some were struggling. But all were willing to open their homes and their hearts to the people they'd left behind.

Shihori listened to each of them, each of those who were departing. To where they were going, what people they'd be reconnecting with. She was happy for them, but it meant the end of a long chapter in her life. The chapter where Shihori had taken over for Grandpa, had taken care of the village.

It was decided that they'd all go back, take their belongings with them and see what happened come midnight when nobody was there and it was time for the curse to take hold. Jun and Mirei departed with the baby, and a few of the other residents had nothing to their names and decided to be on their way. But it was around 10:00 PM when those remaining made one last walk to Matsuo. They gathered in the valley, chatting about what they'd miss and what they definitely wouldn't miss.

Plans were made to keep holding the annual Matsuo parties, and Shihori insisted they all come back to stay with her in Hachimantai. Other relatives and friends were invited, though Shihori wasn't sure where she'd house them. But she had a year to figure that out. 

It had taken Nino five minutes to run into town and run back. He had an old backpack with some clothes and all of Maki's letters bundled together. They were clearly eager to start their life together, difficult as it would be. Shihori smiled as each member of the village came out with their belongings. Elderly Takahashi-san who would be taking a train up to Aomori in the morning to reunite with a daughter, Katori-san who had spoken on the phone with his wife that day at Shihori's house for the first time in fourteen long years. She hoped that they'd be able to reconcile.

Soon only two residents remained, and Maki checked her phone. The screen's glow told everyone it was 11:56 PM. Almost time. Eiko-san and one of the teenagers, Yuto-kun, had not returned. "It's probably because he's hauling all of that manga," Yuto-kun's friend Chiaki was telling everyone. "Doesn't he know he can get more out here?"

Shihori shivered a bit even in her jacket. It was dark and the fog was growing heavier. Aiba squeezed her hand. His mother would stay with them at the house for a few days before heading for a reunion with her sister and her husband.

"Finally!" she heard Nino say when Yuto-kun came running, waving his arms as he came down the hill towards them. He seemed to have left his manga behind.

But Yuto's panicked cries pierced the darkness. "Aiba-chan!" he shouted. "It's your mom! She fell! Aiba-chan, she's still by Block 8!"

"But there's only two minutes..." Maki said, and as Yuto-kun crossed the end of the road, meeting the group where the village's boundary ended, Shihori felt Aiba's fingers slip away from her own.

"Masaki," she whispered, holding her hand out in surprise.

Aiba didn't even turn back, ignoring everyone's shouts for him to wait. He took off running, screaming for his mother. Shihori could only stand there, horrified, at the thought of what might have happened. Everyone stood waiting at the edge of town. The fog swallowed Aiba up as he ran to help Eiko-san.

Everyone was gathered around Maki's phone, staring at the numbers. "He's fast," Chiaki said. "He always ran really fast."

But as 11:58 became 11:59, Shihori panicked. She remembered the night she'd walked Eiko-san back, how quickly Matsuo Village had turned back to ruins right before her eyes. 

"The fog!" Takahashi-san cried. The buildings were already changing, and the road was slipping away into the mist.

"No!" Shihori's scream was so loud she hadn't even known she was capable of it. She made to run across the boundary, to pull Aiba back, but then Nino and Maki were holding onto her. She screamed again, wordlessly. For Eiko-san, for her son. For the life she had with Aiba that was still just beginning. She struggled in their arms, could hear Maki begging her to stay back on this side with them.

Her short time with Aiba flashed before her. His arms around her, the feel of his mouth against her own. The sound of his gasp in her ear the first time they came together. How safe she felt to wake at his side.

Midnight arrived, and the Matsuo residents, save for Aiba-kun and his mother, were safely outside. When the moon came out from behind the clouds, revealing the ruins again, Shihori took off running. Nino and Maki were at her heels, calling for her.

She ran until she tripped and fell, landing hard on her hands and knees in the center of town. Empty. Matsuo was empty. The curse had taken them both away for another year, and she barely registered Nino's arms slipping around her, lifting her to carry her back to the house. The joyous mood that had been felt all day had been snuffed out. 

"Come back," she mumbled, her words lost in Nino's shirt. "Aiba-kun, come back."

\--

When she woke, it didn't feel right. 

Her bed was empty, and she was still in yesterday's clothes. She'd fallen pretty hard, limping her way to her bedroom door, finding bandages on her knees and her hands wrapped up. She slid open the door. The house seemed quiet, although she heard quiet talking coming from the kitchen. Shihori found Nino and Maki there, serious looks on their faces.

"You have to get back to school," she said quietly, and her cousin turned.

Maki's arms were around her instantly, holding on tight. "Oh Shii-chan, I'm sorry."

Nino explained that the two of them had already been to and from the village that morning, leaving a first aid kit for Eiko-san and hoping that would be enough. They left pens and tons of paper in case she needed anything more urgently. Nino was going back soon to check and see if Aiba had responded yet.

They made her sit, forced some buttered toast and coffee into her. The residents of Matsuo who had intended to stay with Shihori until relatives came for them or it was time to catch a bus or train were gone, having spent the night with Jun and Mirei instead. Shihori could barely remember anything after seeing Aiba disappearing into the fog, and she was embarrassed that she'd made such a scene. 

It wasn't like Aiba was gone forever. Only a year.

But, Shihori knew, it would be the longest year of her life. 

Nino kissed the top of her head before leaving for the hike down to the village. Winter would come to Matsuo in a month, and if Eiko-san was truly injured it would be very tough indeed. Maki sat with her in silence, for once unable to find the words to say.

When Nino returned, he had good news. Eiko-san had only twisted her ankle. If she stayed off of it, she would heal soon enough. Shihori was relieved to hear it. There was already a note for her from Aiba, and Nino handed it over. He and her cousin made to leave the room, but she shook her head. She didn't want to be alone just yet.

She unfolded it, finding his rather sloppy handwriting. There was no apology, and she didn't want one. It was his mother, and she couldn't blame him for what he'd done. Instead he had a simple message for her: "The truth of the matter is this - I love you." The same words she'd written to him not so long ago.

Nino and Maki stayed for a week. Nino had even gone into Hachimantai, explaining to Aiba's boss that Aiba would regretfully be taking off for a year to care for his sick mother, and that he hoped to still have a place at the restaurant when he returned.

They went to the village each day, and Shihori went to her favorite lookout place. It didn't feel as lonely. She shut her eyes and knew she wasn't imagining it when she felt a sudden warmth, almost like an embrace, knowing that somehow Aiba was there with her. They'd get through this, the both of them. Together.

\--

December brought her birthday and Aiba's too. Twenty-four and twenty-seven. They still had many years ahead of them. Despite how busy she became with work and starting to write her second novel (as Aiba insisted she do in one of his letters to her), she visited Matsuo every day.

In heavy rain or in the snow, the winter was as cold in Iwate as always. Visiting daily and having only two residents to care for, Shihori was able to make do without the cumbersome wheelbarrow now. She only had to bring food and entertainment. Jun had even shown up one day with a tiny portable TV set that ran on battery power so Aiba could keep up with his precious variety shows. 

Nino had found work in Tokyo and he paid to ship baked goods Maki had made north to Hachimantai. They were making a life together, and when Maki graduated in spring they were pondering a move of their own. Morioka maybe, depending on the work they could find.

Letters flooded in to the house among the cedar trees, from points north and south and all in between. From Katori-san, whose wife had a new family, but she still helped him get a fresh start. From Jun's parents and Mirei's as well. From people who had come for an annual Matsuo party and from those who'd only heard of them and hoped to be invited come November. 

Spring did come, and Maki was hired by a company in Morioka. By May she and Nino were in Iwate, driving over weekly and sometimes more often. Through other Matsuo connections, Nino had gotten papers and an identity, and he charmed his way into a job with decent pay.

By summer baby Taiyo was walking, and by fall Jun and Mirei announced that Taiyo would soon be a big brother.

As the days slipped away, so did Shihori's sadness and loneliness. She was surrounded by friends, and if she really wanted to feel Aiba's presence she had only to go to the village and walk among the ruins. He always found her somehow. She could always sense his closeness.

It had been her parents' worry that she'd come north and be isolated, but it was the furthest from the truth. Her years living in Iwate had been difficult but rewarding. She turned in the final draft of her second novel as November arrived. She cleaned the house from top to bottom. It would be the largest Matsuo annual party yet.

Aiba had left a message in the village for her the night before Matsuo was due to reappear. "I've been storing up a year's worth of short jokes. I hope you're ready."

For the first time, she was eager to hear them.

\--

There had to be at least seventy people in the valley. There were flashlights and lanterns for when it grew dark, along with folding chairs and picnic baskets. This year's event was held just outside Matsuo, and this time everyone was going to firmly say goodbye. Shihori herself had instituted a ban - nobody in the village limits after 10:00 PM, no exceptions. They didn't need a repeat of the previous year.

Eiko-san was healthy and embarrassed when she emerged, hugging Shihori and not letting her go for some time. "My son, it turns out, is not the only clumsy one in the family," she apologized.

When Eiko-san let her go, he was already waiting for her. His hair needed a cut, and he looked like he'd gone a year without sleeping properly. His smile, however, hadn't changed.

"Well," she said, trying not to cry. "Aiba-kun, welcome back."

He wiped his eyes, laughing. "Did you shrink while I was gone?"

Despite the November chill, the party was warm and noisy. There was enough food to allow everyone to gain a few pounds, and it was like a large family reunion. The village loomed above them, the concrete buildings emptied out and clotheslines barren.

The sheer number of former village residents allowed for Aiba to tug on Shihori's hand, pulling her away from the valley and into the forest by mid-afternoon. He miraculously kept all his wisecracks to himself. It was Aiba's preferred route this time, the one they'd taken when she was nine and he was twelve. A steeper ascent and not actually faster than Shihori's, but she decided not to say anything.

They ended up in a tangle of limbs on the floor of her empty house. They eventually lay side by side facing each other, Shihori shutting her eyes at the blissful feeling of Aiba's fingertips tracing along the curve of her hip. "I've been unemployed for a year," he said. "So I hope you don't mind me coming to this empty-handed."

She cracked open one eye, seeing him staring at her. "Coming to what empty-handed?"

He pulled her hand into his, pointedly tapping on the ring finger of her left hand. "I don't have one to give you."

Now her eyes were fully open. "You're doing this here, on the floor?! Aiba-kun, we're _naked_ right now..."

He smiled. "You'd prefer me to propose to you in my underwear and socks then? Because if that's not romantic, I don't know what is..."

She shoved him onto his back, hearing him laugh. "You're the worst!"

"So is that a no?"

"Say it properly!"

He got to his feet without shame. "Shihori-sama, marry me and this is all yours forever."

She turned away from him, shutting her eyes tight and curling up in a ball in her horror. "Can't you do anything right?! I can't tell my children this story!"

She could feel his cold, ticklish toes prodding at the back of her thigh. "Come on. You know you want to say yes."

"Disgusting!"

"You didn't think so twenty minutes ago!"

"Really disgusting!" she screeched. "You're such a jerk!"

There was a loud knock on the front door. "Are you done yet?" came Nino's voice on the other side. "You didn't even pull the curtains shut, you freaks!"

She scrambled her way across the floor on hands and knees, mortified, heading for her bedroom. She changed clothes and when she returned she found Aiba had casually wrapped himself in a blanket, chatting with Nino in the living room about the cake Maki had made for Eiko-san to thank her for her many years as Village Elder in Matsuo. He'd only come up to the house to get it from the refrigerator. Shihori turned scarlet. Her and Aiba's clothes were still strewn everywhere. Her bra had somehow ended up hanging from a lamp shade.

That was it.

"The pair of you. Out of my house, right now!"

When Shihori made it to the valley again, cake in her arms, the assembled crowd burst into applause and cheers. Apparently it wasn't applause for the cake. Aiba had apparently returned first, Nino in tow, to inform everyone that he was soon to be a married man.

She considered shoving the entire cake in his face, but Maki had gone to a lot of trouble and it would be a waste of a very delicious cake. She settled for eating half of her slice and dumping the rest of it onto Aiba's lap, licking the frosting from her lips with a satisfied smirk.

He chuckled, looking up at her. "But you'll marry me anyway, won't you?"

She nodded. "Of course."

\--

The sun set, and the lanterns went on. The party continued into the night. Eiko-san pulled Shihori aside, and together they looked at the village on the hill.

"I came upon an old woman in this very forest," Eiko-san explained. "I was maybe six, seven years old. My parents were always saying that people were leaving Iwate Prefecture, that the future was in the big cities. In Tokyo, in Osaka. That nobody wanted to live here any longer. I didn't know the woman, and she looked the same as anyone else. She was just sitting on a tree stump, resting."

Somehow Shihori knew that Eiko-san hadn't told many people this story. She wondered if even Masaki knew.

"I was picking mushrooms, probably further away than my mother liked. The old woman was friendly, so I told her these things. I told her that I was sad for my parents, that all their friends were leaving. I said that it would be for the best if everyone stayed in Matsuo forever, that nobody left. I was a child, how could I have known? It took us so long to adjust once it happened, and it was all my fault. I had cursed us. The old woman granted my wish, only allowing one day a year for people to leave. I ruined so many people's lives..."

"Eiko-san, that's not true..."

The older woman looked sad, looking up to where the buildings were shrouded in fog. "When I fell last year, I thought 'suits you right, Eiko. Stay here all alone and remember what you did.' But then Masaki came to me. I screamed for him to go back, to go back to you and back to his friends. But he said he wouldn't go if I wasn't going with him. You can't force people to stay and you can't force people to leave, I realized, not forever. Curse or no curse. People go where they're wanted, where they're needed. Where they can be the person they wish to be. Whether that's Iwate or Tokyo or the other side of the world."

She finally turned, squeezing Shihori's hand. 

"You helped us, and I thank you. But will you stay here? Even when there's no one in the village?"

Shihori didn't have an answer. Not yet.

She walked back, finding Aiba in one of the circles of lawn chairs, bragging about his special seat at the Tokyo Dome. He kept speaking, pulling her by the wrist and settling her in his lap without stopping the flow of the conversation. She wrapped her arms around his neck, breathing in the scent of him as his arm settled around her back. Curse or no curse, people go where they're wanted, where they're needed.

The Matsuo Village residents saw something different this time when the fog came to swallow up the buildings. There was a flash of light, nearly blinding them all. When they looked again, the hill was completely empty.

\--

"You're silly, Mama," Mai said with a chuckle as they moved through the forest, clambering over fallen logs. "Towns don't just disappear."

"This one did," Shihori said, holding her daughter's hand tightly. 

Seven-year-old Mai turned back with her skeptical expression. "Papa, it's just one of her books, right? One of her Mako Village books."

"Mama's not a liar," Masaki said, carrying their picnic basket. "Mama is many things. She's short and she's funny-looking, but she doesn't lie."

"Don't tell your child that her mother is funny-looking!"

Ten-year-old Taiyo-kun came running up alongside them, his parents telling him to slow down. He brandished a stick, holding it in the air. "It's true, Mai-chan! There was a whole town there. My papa and mama lived there, and so did your papa."

Mai was still skeptical, especially when they hit the edge of the trees, spying the grassy valley and the hill just beyond covered only in wildflowers. "But there's nothing there!"

Nino came up from behind, ruffling Mai's hair. "Right? What a bunch of untrustworthy parents you have."

Maki elbowed him, and together the group headed for the hill for their annual picnic. Maki, Nino, and their toddler. Aiba, Shihori, and Mai. Jun, Mirei, and their brood of four. The fog had long since cleared, leaving a sunny spot hidden here at the break in the trees. Sometimes Taiyo-kun found a few things that were out of place. An old, empty cup of instant ramen noodles. A Hanshin Tigers t-shirt. 

Proof, Taiyo-kun said, that his parents and Mai's were telling the truth. Proof, Nino said, that littering was wrong and to be sure and clean up your mess before you leave.

Shihori supposed that it didn't matter, really, if anyone else believed or not. 

She'd always come back.

 

THE END


End file.
